


Stilinski’s Model

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [7]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Allison Argent & Stiles Stilinski Friendship, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Stiles, Blow Jobs, Body Language, Cthulhu Mythos, Derek Hale is Bad at Feelings, Established Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, F/M, Frottage, Ghouls, Idiots in Love, Incest, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Miscommunication, Non-Linear Narrative, Pack Cuddles, Pack Dynamics, Peter Hale Sucks at Some of Them Too, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Scott is a Good Friend, Werewolf Culture, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-04-27 01:59:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 49,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14415201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: The funny thing about being Stiles Stilinski, Miskatonic University graduate student, is studying cosmic horror tentacle monsters is way more straightforward than being in a relationship.  At least nobody in the Cthulhu Mythos pretends that everything is fine.Also known as: that time he and Derek and Peter went down to the University’s Southwest campus and theyfinallyworked out how to do threesome dating, so at least Stiles could justify the body count to his dad that way.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: You only need a passing familiarity with the Cthulhu Mythos to follow along here, but you really should have read the prior stories or the character interaction isn't going to make any sense.

For the record, Stiles in no way, shape, or form had any intentions whatsoever of making a vlog, much less an award-winning series (in documentary _and_ dramedy categories, because geometry isn’t the only thing that gets warped around here and Miskatonic’s PR department has no business even _existing_ , let alone having non-madness-inducing artistic ambitions). He wasn’t even trying to, well, _log_. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t till the tenth installment that he even realized Derek was taping him.

“Look, I can’t pronounce this Aklo or Pnakotic stuff. I can’t even read your handwriting, so don’t try and write it phonetically again. I just don’t want to have my brain eaten by something from another dimension because I opened your Tupperware,” is how Derek explains himself, while trying to pry his phone out of Stiles’ hand.

“I…guess that’s reasonable. I mean, the—the part about not wanting—wanting your brain eaten,” Stiles says, while resisting. “The part about opening my Tupperware, not so much, since seriously, I told you, I don’t mix samples and food. I have a separate fridge at all times, with warning stickers and I really, really hope I don’t need to translate what a skeletal glowing octopus means—”

“It’s only a skeleton when you turn the lights off and—okay, fine, have it already!” Derek says, abruptly throwing up his hands. He takes a step back, then gives Stiles one of those hereditary Hale side-eyes as Stiles topples onto the couch and accidentally flails his feet near one of Derek’s legs. Because obviously, gravity did that just to annoy Derek. “Are you sure your dick’s the only thing that the Dream Lands did something to?”

Stiles stops flailing. “What?”

“Well, with the—the grabbing, and—I’m a _werewolf_ and for God’s sake.” Halfway through, Derek gives up on figuring out whether he’s confused or offended, and just drops into the armchair to stare moodily out at the world. “I’ll just get a new phone.”

Stiles is fluent in something like eight languages, conversational in another three, and capable of effective curses in two more. Granted, German and English are the only ones that still qualify as living languages, but anyway. The point is, he’s good at translating, and _really_ good at the kind of contextual guessing necessary when whether you’re calling up a rational Elder Thing who can be bribed with chemical equations or its former shoggoth servant who just wants to kill everything turns on figuring out where you should insert a breath in the middle of a fifty-syllable word. And yet figuring out how Derek gets from accidental consumption of Mi-go residue to needing a new phone is totally beyond him (he always has this terrible feeling that his dad is laughing his head off at these times).

Anyway, Stiles looks at the phone, and more specifically, at the half-played video on it. Then he looks at Derek, who’s doing that thing where he avoids looking at Stiles because he’s hoping if he does that, Stiles will randomly abandon the conversation and leave the room. Which Stiles has only confirmed is the correct interpretation because he’s watched Derek do it to Peter and often Peter actually _does_ leave and then Derek looks relieved. “You can have your phone back,” he finally says.

It takes Derek a second to turn his head. “What?”

“Your phone,” Stiles says, holding it up. “You can have it back. I just wanted to see—I mean, like I was saying, you don’t need to tape me saying the disarming chant for the sample fridge, but anyway, that’s not why I wanted to see it.”

Derek blinks hard. “Well, then why were you fighting me so much for it?”

“I wasn’t—I just wanted to see!” Stiles blurts out. “You can have your phone! I just need to see this clip because it’s the only evidence we’ve got and I need to know what color it turned while I was chanting, so I know where I banished it!”

“You—don’t know that already?” Derek says, blinking even harder. 

“Well, no, I was busy being pissed off that you and Peter ended up in that hole!” Stiles says, throwing up _his_ hands now. “How hard is that to understand?”

Derek looks at Stiles. He opens his mouth, pauses, and then gets up out of the armchair instead. Just as Stiles is realizing _he’s_ about to leave the room, Peter comes in and Derek actually sags a little. “I was going to get you,” he says to Peter. “I think he’s still mad—”

“I know, I heard,” Peter sighs. He gives Derek a look that makes Derek reluctantly go back to the armchair, then works around the end of the couch towards Stiles. “And again, I’m sorry, Stiles. It was never your fight and I realize we’ve ruined your trip, and I promise that—”

“I’m mad because I _banished_ them instead of having a shoggoth eat them!” Stiles says, staring at them. Honestly, he thought he had a pretty good handle on Peter, at least, but that is a genuine look of surprise on Peter’s face. “And now I don’t know where I sent them to, and I’m pissed off because I might’ve sent them somewhere nicer than a shoggoth gut because that’s where I still want to send them to, and oh, my God, somebody tried to kill you in _front of me_ and why is _this_ the argument we’re having?”

Honestly. Stiles honestly is starting to think he doesn’t know _either_ of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elder Things are crazy-looking aliens, but unlike most Cthulhu Mythos races, they're basically humans in barrel-shaped tentacle-enabled bodies. They scientifically study things, and came up with shoggoths in a pre-human example of the case against bioengineering (Lovecraft was weirdly anticipatory of fears across the political spectrum).


	2. Chapter 2

Okay, maybe it’d be better to back up a little. So before the whole Stiles finds out Derek secretly films him and edits the clips and titles them with stuff like ‘how to open the fridge,’ Stiles is going on a research trip to the Great Plains, because actually, middle America is a seething hotbed of interdimensional monstrosity action, especially of the causes-insanity-but- _not_ -Cthulhu variety, and Stiles’ tentative graduate hypothesis about the new Nemeton could use some cross-regional testing.

“It doesn’t even have grass,” Derek mutters, peering out across the backyard of Miskatonic’s Zamacoma Institute of Southwestern Oldways Studies. “Where would you even put a tentacle alien?”

“You wouldn’t, Derek, which is why we bribed Lydia for the portable sonar instead of the reinforced fish-hooks,” Peter mutters back, unloading an ungodly number of tightly-sealed black boxes from his rental van. “Speaking of, if you could take a few minutes out of staring at the sunset, your help in getting this inside before the grit ruins it would be _greatly_ appreciated.

Not their van, his, because Stiles is here for two weeks and the nice thing about dressing in Goodwill rejects is there is _always_ a Goodwill around, so Stiles saved his space in the trunk of Derek’s car for true necessities, like extra chargers for his phone and spare water bottles and a cooler of frozen rats in case any of Yig’s offspring need to be convinced to not coil up in his shoes. You know, what you’d need for surviving temporarily in scrubland without getting cursed by an overprotective indigenous rattlesnake god. Peter, on the other hand, needed to rent a van to carry enough equipment to ensure no eldritch horror was going to burrow up under their feet, despite Stiles talking his father into giving Peter access to the staff’s security guide for the Institute. In fact, after Peter read through that, he upgraded his original rental to a _bigger_ van.

Okay, he’s a werewolf, and werewolves are territorial and Peter takes anything to do with werewolf aggression, triples it, and then runs it through Machiavelli bootcamp. And…okay, Stiles gets distracted by the way Peter’s biceps flex whenever Peter carries around heavy boxes, because thankfully, werewolf strength doesn’t keep that from happening. But—

“Are you sure this isn’t going to break one of the house rules?” Scott says doubtfully, coming over to stand by Stiles and voice the stuff Stiles is thinking but isn’t going to say. “I thought it said something about being careful about scratching the floor, because they’re original hardwood?”

Derek turns around and finally grabs a box. “So we’ll stick down some plastic first. Peter brought enough.”

Scott looks unconvinced, but clearly, just bringing way too many methods of detecting entities Miskatonic’s already warded against doesn’t seem like a big enough deal for him to overcome his natural good manners and stop Derek. They just eye each other for a second, doing awkward werewolf dominance vibing (so Derek and Scott are…non-enemies, but also, Derek clearly has issues with Scott and Scott even more clearly has no idea those issues exist), and then Derek snorts, stacks up a couple more boxes, and stalks after Peter. 

“Well, maybe, but the plastic would also make things slippery, and I kind of have a bad record with that,” Scott says, with a little sheepish shoulder-hitch. “I just don’t want to make you lose your deposit, and there was this time with the garage downtown and—”

“Which wasn’t really your fault, since they had plastic all over so they could clean up the bodies easier, and you saved two people. The place was getting off cheap just having to pay to replace that car lift,” Allison says briskly. She tucks her arm through Scott’s, smiles at him, and then pivots to shot Stiles a disapproving-mom look, all part of the same smooth routine. “Well, if it makes them feel better, but my dad and I talked enough with your dad that I think we’ll pass on doing up our rooms.”

“Yeah, sure, I don’t think Peter was going to insist, anyway,” Stiles says dryly. Because yes, he thinks this is overkill too, but no, he’s not going to just sell out his boyfriend’s paranoia.

“I guess we’d better just work on getting everything unloaded?” Scott suggests. “It is getting dark, and faster we do that, faster we can all clean up and eat and get a good night’s sleep. I’m really looking forward to the dawn hike, so I want to make sure I don’t miss it.”

Allison’s expression changes as she looks back at Scott—not completely losing the disapproving angle, because Stiles knows her well enough now to know werewolves aren’t the only ones who prefer nocturnal hours and the Institute’s wildlife walks start at kill me o’clock. But she loves Scott, and Scott loves animals, so that’s tops of their to-do list, even before the real reason they’re in town: scoping out the Institute’s Daemonic Management Studies program for Allison while Scott’s in between his exams at veterinary school. Because apparently, not only would Miskatonic _love_ to have an Argent enroll with them, they’re willing to fly her and Scott down for a courtship tour.

“If they figure out all they’ve got to do is set up a shelter for mutated animals, we’re going to have a problem,” Allison mutters as Scott leaves her and goes over to grab the remaining boxes. He stops and reaches into the front of his shirt, then shoos Quint up to perch on his head before he hefts a box, and she starts to smile, then gives herself a hard shake. “Or is that why this hike comes with a ten-page brochure?”

“Well, it includes a stop at the local ghoul community burrow and they do have very specific cultural asks, like no pictures and not asking to see their tails—”

“That’s _without_ the nondisclosure agreement. And the liability waiver,” Allison says. She rolls her shoulders, then sighs and pushes her hair back from her face, looking over at Stiles. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because it’s really great that I might be able to get a full ride, but…should I be worried about _why_ they’re so excited for what my family knows about hereditary curses? You know, since that’s mostly from firsthand experience, where we’re the ones being cursed?”

Stiles shrugs. “I don’t really think that’s being ungrateful, that’s just understanding that Miskatonic doesn’t accept federal student loans because then pretty much the only government agency with oversight over them is the IRS. And they’re kind of sympathetic to the whole math is a weapon thing.”

Allison looks a little like she wishes Stiles would sell out _her_ paranoia, but like Scott, her good manners are holding her back. So she just makes a face and then stoops to grab the last of her bags. “Well, we’re here, might as well not waste the trip. Guess I’ll just keep an eye out for that,” she says under her breath. “Um, give us half an hour to settle in and we’ll meet you for dinner?”

“Sure, or just text me. No rush or anything, I already checked in with the security lead here, so we can take our time,” Stiles says, and then he feels a little guilty, even though she’s told him in the past she just wants him to be honest about Miskatonic ways. “We’re probably going to be driving into town for dinner, selection’ll be a lot better, trust me. And it’s got plenty of non-Miskatonic businesses around, so you can ease into the weirdness.”

That seems to make her feel better, since her stride loosens up as they go up the walk to the visiting-scholar residences, which are really nice as the university goes. The foundations may be antediluvian, but everything above the subbasement was built within the last century, and more importantly, built by somebody who thought about things like modern utilities and ventilation and lighting, and not just the accursed angles of Tindalos. The suites have central HVAC, and the cold settings go all the way down to ‘morgue.’ There are actual _skylights_. 

Which offend Peter. “They don’t _offend_ me,” he claims, relaxing back into it as Stiles spoons up behind him. And then he goes back to scowling up at the clearly inadequate glass, one hand to his chin in that way that means he’s going to be doing some midnight renovations involving boobytraps. “They just seem very oddly placed for a facility that boasts a nightgaunt-proof certification.”

Stiles tries not to sigh into his boyfriend’s shoulder. “Nightgaunts actually are pretty obedient if you train them right, and the landing pad for them is across campus. And also, motion-activated lasers. They have really sensitive eyes, and don’t bank that quick.”

Peter’s head turns a little, and from the bit of mouth Stiles can see, he knows the man’s still skeptical. But Peter heaves a deep breath and puts on one of those well-I’ll-hide-the-homicide-for-you faces. “I’m not questioning the security standards, Stiles,” he says. “I’m sure your father vetted them very thoroughly.”

“But you’re questioning the _architectural_ choices,” Stiles says, tucking his chin over Peter’s shoulder. And inching his fingertips across Peter’s stomach, nudging them into the abdominal grooves he can feel through the thin material of Peter’s tee, just the way that Peter loves.

“Well…” Peter can’t help himself, and then he really can’t help himself, a low, pleased noise stirring in his throat as he twists his head around, lips just grazing at the side of Stiles’ jaw. “They’re also somewhat less than ideal for privacy, if you happen to be concerned about that.”

Stiles shrugs and lets it move his chin higher up Peter’s shoulder, so that his nose is rubbing against the skin just behind Peter’s ear. “This is the living room, isn’t this technically a common area? So it’s not like we’re really going to do anything in here that requires privacy, right?”

“Hmmm, I suppose. Theoretically,” Peter purrs, not at all bothering to check said skylight as he arches himself and presses his ass right back against Stiles. One of his hands finds its way back to Stiles’ left thigh, high up on the front, flirting with where the seam curves out slightly to accommodate—with decreasing slack—Stiles’ groin. “Though it is located in a private suite, and the only other—”

“We skipping dinner?” says their suitemate.

Derek isn’t surprised to catch them the way they are, though Stiles still twitches because one, welcoming PDA isn’t the same as being an exhibitionist and two, make some _noise_ , potential predator types hanging with the trained Great Old Ones banisher. These days he also doesn’t get that disgusted look on his face, but if anything, things were less awkward when he did. Now he just stands there with his hands jammed in his leather coat, shifting on the balls on his feet like he really wants them to figure out whether they’re going to be annoyed, so he can just flip to being annoyed right back. It’s like watching someone who really needs a bathroom, except that’s just physical tension and this comes with a bunch of the emotional kind.

“No, of course not,” Peter says after a moment. His hand lingers on Stiles’ leg, flexing once as if it might continue its groping, and then Peter sees something in Derek’s body language that makes him reluctantly ease back from Stiles. “You do remember we packed snacks, if you’re in that much—”

“No, I’m fine. Just…are we putting things up after we eat? Or do we need to start now?” Derek says. He looks around as if he wishes he’d brought a prop for fortuitous subject changes, then lands on the skylight. “Why the hell would they put it right over the couch? Then if you’re sitting there, you have to look up all the time to see if something’s trying to come through.”

Stiles throws his hands up and both werewolves…don’t exactly flinch, it’s not that obvious. They don’t _move_ , not that he can see, but it’s like with hearing—they can hear things that’d be so far beyond Stiles’ range that he’d just get a shiver down his spine. Except in reverse, so they signal something with the way they hold themselves that he can’t read except to figure out it’s nervous. And he just…moves his hands around a lot when he talks, that’s just how he is.

He pulls them in, and wishes _he_ had a prop. “Okay, okay,” he says. He does have his phone—he takes that out of his pocket and opens up the residence handbook the Institute emailed him. “The skylight has a retractable shutter, I’m pretty sure I read something about a remote, and oh, hey, Allison texted they’ll be down in the lobby in ten…five minutes ago. I told her we should drive into town to eat, but if you two want to stay here and unpack, we can probably change that to carry-out.”

“No, I’d rather go out,” Peter says. He’s a little abrupt and smooths it over by leaning back and nuzzling the side of Stiles’ throat. “I’m sure the security here’s just fine for a couple hours, and I’d love to see the town. Just let me use the toilet and then we can go.”

“Do we need to take the go-bag?” Derek says, relaxing, as Peter swings to walk by him to the bathroom. He even looks amused as Peter arches brows at him. “Or were we hitting up the local pack later?”

“On our first night, Derek? What awful manners,” Peter scoffs, disappearing behind the door. “You know it’s rude to pick a fight before you’ve even given them a chance to talk to us and realize how outclassed they are.”

“Says the guy who likes lecturing people with one foot on them,” Derek mutters, rolling his eyes. Then he stiffens as Stiles comes up to him.

Stiles hesitates, then holds out the remote to the skylight shutters, which he’d located per the handbook instructions while Peter and Derek had been sniping at each other. “If it’s really a huge deal, this isn’t peak season so they probably have a room on a lower floor. You know, if I asked,” he tells Derek. “I just asked for the top because I thought you guys would like seeing the moonlight.”

Derek glances at the remote, then looks sharply at Stiles. Then he looks away just as sharply, staring intently at a point over Stiles’ shoulder. He extracts one hand from his jacket and takes the remote. “It’s not, it’s just denning stuff and it’s weird to put one there but it—Peter’ll feel better once he makes a point to somebody about not messing with him.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. Since the remote’s no longer taking up his hands, he retreats to fiddling with his phone. Might as well find somewhere to eat while they’re working through the fresh awkward. “So…that work for you too, or I mean, really, I could—”

“It’s fine,” Derek says curtly, with a slight macho jerk of his head. Then his eyes flick to Stiles. He pauses, lips pressed together, and shoves his hand back in his coat as he switches his stare to Stiles’ chin instead. “Look, I’m fine. I’ll…it’s roomy, actually.”

“It comes with a lot more built-in wards too, so once you get keyed into the security, you’re set for most of the normal stuff, like the fridge and the kitchen cabinets,” Stiles says. “That’s kind of why I have so many set up at the rental, it’s not integrated from scratch, so we need all the passwords and triggers. So living here actually should be a lot simpler for you.”

Derek looks up at his eyes and for a second Stiles thinks the man is going to grunt at him and then walk off, like Derek tends to do when things just get too weird and aren’t life-threatening. But then Derek…kind of winces, and then his expression settles into something actually within the realm of embarrassed. “No, it’s okay. And the way you’ve got the rental isn’t that big a deal, I just need to finish reading that guide you sent me.”

“Um, yeah, that would help,” Stiles says, semi-accidentally, because he sent that to Derek months ago, after working on it for a month to make it not only comprehensive, but as user-friendly to the non-Cthulhic expert as possible. But Derek’s making an effort so he tries, too. “It probably also would’ve helped if it wasn’t eighty pages long, but—”

“It got easier once I figured out how to use the index,” Derek says, shrugging. He looks around the room again and his hand sneaks out to rub at the side of his neck. “This place is fine, it’s just new. It smells all…but we’ll get used to it. That’ll keep us busy while you’re in your meetings.”

“Oh, okay, so I can tell security they don’t need to watch out for a spike in supernatural brawls?” Stiles says. “They got all geared up for the property destruction.”

He’s taking a risk there, but it pays off: Derek snorts, and then even lets a little tooth show. Sure, the smile’s of the mauling variety, and clearly for whoever Derek is currently picturing in his head rather than for Stiles, but it’s still progression off the usual grimace. “If they’ve got that ready anyway, no point in wasting it,” Derek says.

“Just because Scott’s mom isn’t around to yell at you for it,” Stiles says, tsking, and Derek looks at him and actually smiles _at_ him.

For a second, and the dangerous edge to it immediately crumbles into a hesitation that looks odd on the man, considering how Derek is basically the visual ideal for swaggering bad boy attitude. On the other hand, the hesitation doesn’t immediately kill the smile.

“So,” Derek says, no longer smiling, but looking uncomfortably earnest. “This research you’re doing, you’re—”

The toilet flushes and Derek’s head jerks over to the bathroom. He watches the door for a few seconds, and then Peter comes out. Peter looks annoyed at Derek, but visibly changes his mind about saying anything and instead just comes over and gives Derek a once-over. Then, sighing, he lifts his hand and straightens out the collar of Derek’s coat in the back, which got twisted at some point. “All right, then, shall we show this place what it means for a Hale to visit?” he says.

He’s leaving his hand a little longer on Derek than strictly necessary, and Derek rolls his eyes at what Peter’s saying but doesn’t exactly shrug him off. Also, looks maybe relieved Peter’s doing all the talking again, when Peter then turns and starts quizzing Stiles about whether Dr. McNeill had gotten back to Stiles about those archive requests, and other questions about Stiles’ research. He seems fine to fall in behind as they move out to the lobby to meet Scott and Allison, anyway.

* * *

Technically, Stiles and Peter are dating Derek. After they were sure the Hales’ house was three-headed-hunter-eating-frog-free, they sat down and actually discussed what everybody wanted and their expectations for moving forward, and sure, it was like simultaneously digging out teeth with a dull butter knife (Derek) and trying to pin a stick of butter against a sizzling pan with a paper straw (Peter), but they did, in fact, figure out a plan. More or less. It’s just that plan depends on things like Derek actually speaking to Stiles about things besides where they’re going and what he shouldn’t touch in the apartment, and on him and Peter not arguing about everything, and Stiles was possibly overly optimistic in assuming the two of them admitting they both eventually wanted to end up in bed would be sufficient motivation there (well, honestly, they were halfway to third base _before_ the talk, the rest didn’t seem like a huge stretch).

All of which is to say, they meet Scott and Allison, drive into town and find somewhere to eat, and everything seems to be going just fine. Stiles manages to rein in his enthusiasm for talking pseudo-Cthulhic mimicry theories so they can talk about something everybody can follow along with: Scott’s latest run-in with some asshole trying to destroy Beacon Hills.

“I know it wasn’t the best idea to just go, but nobody had heard from Isaac in three hours and he was patrolling that side of the preserve,” Scott says half-heartedly. “I was just going to run in, see if I could find anything, and call for back-up if I saw something.”

There are four faces around this terrace table, excluding Scott, and three of them are deeply skeptical. Even though Allison’s snuggled into Scott’s side, with their left hands twined together and resting on the table-top, she doesn’t look like she believes a word coming out of his mouth. “Well, okay, I guess if you couldn’t call him,” Stiles starts.

Scott blinks. “Oh…right.”

Stiles pauses, because Scott says that in the way of somebody who’s just remembered leaving his laundry in the shared machine a week ago, and…Derek and Peter are both rolling their eyes, while Allison is grimacing. “You didn’t try? Was he in a part of the preserve that has bad reception?”

“It’s not that big, and there’s a phone tower on those hills right outside that are taller than anything in there, so you can’t lose reception unless you go underground,” Derek mutters, poking at his food. “And we filled in most of those tunnels, and the ones we didn’t have security cameras now. What, were those not working?”

Scott now looks like he’s standing in the middle of the road and someone’s shining a floodlight on him.

“I thought you were attending vet school now?” Peter offers, by way of not really offering an out. “I’m surprised you were even nearby.”

“He comes back on the weekends to help out at the clinic, since Alan doesn’t have a full-time replacement yet,” Allison says, glaring at Peter. 

“But I understand this was on a weekday,” Peter says, smiling at her. “I also understand that Laura and your father were already on it, and had specifically told everyone not in town that day to stay away while they handled it.”

Okay. Maybe not the best idea to ask Scott if anything exciting had happened since the last time they’d seen each other (Stiles’ research actually has him in Miskatonic’s San Francisco branch half his weekends). But nobody had said anything to _him_ about an escaped batch of joint snakes, and joint snakes aren’t considered ‘eldritch horrors’ because they’re actually kind of shy so they avoid humans _but_ they’re one of the few creatures whose poison affects werewolves so. Stiles needs to change the subject now, before Allison and Peter reignite their families’ feuding, and just get Peter to give him the download later. Because people come before research.

“So, meeting the ghouls tomorrow,” he breaks in. “You excited?”

“Oh! Yeah, definitely,” Scott says, looking equally happy to jump on the distraction. “I already was emailing back and forth with their community relations manager, they have all these great ideas about composting that we could use—”

The sound of clinking dinnerware jolts Stiles out of his disbelieving haze, just in time for him to see his fork doing a lazy flip in the air, launched off the plate he’s just knocked. He yelps and grabs at it, and…misses, but Derek hands it to him and he flushes and takes it back. “Well, sure, they’d have…ideas about that, I guess,” he says slowly. He doesn’t want to crush Scott’s enthusiasm, but on the other hand, he also promised Scott’s mom to immediately and clearly identify anything with a fatality index higher than Beacon Hills teachers. “You were emailing with who over there? Because ghouls usually aren’t what you’d call _outgoing_ , right, I mean, they definitely interface with human society enough to know how to mess with us, and their sense of humor can fall along the lines of scam artist, unlike the Deep Ones who just want the hybrid babies…”

“Their community relations manager,” Scott says, deflating a little. Not that he holds it against Stiles or anything like that, he just looks sad he’s made Stiles sad. But then, just as Allison is clearly rearing up to jab something at Stiles under the table, his face clears up. He takes his phone out, thumbs at it, and then holds it out towards Stiles. “I’m pretty sure it’s legit, see their Facebook business page? It’s got a Miskatonic professor in the featured reviews section. That’s the guy you said you had for Chthonic Ecology, right?”

That is, in fact, Stiles’ old professor, with a paragraph-long effusive review of this eco-friendly, culturally appropriate, high-end natural burial business that hires and is run by the differently-abled, with the goal of showing death as the end of all vanities and thus the end of all fear. Of course, Pickman the Third comes from a long line of Arkham iconoclasts, in the sense that his family’s always thought the best privacy measure was an experienced horror publicist. 

“I also did get the referral from the Institute when we were booking the hike, and they said if I wanted to learn more about ghouls, I might want to look up this,” Scott goes on. Quint pops out of his shirt, peers at the phone, and then gives Stiles a concurring nod before disappearing back into its pocket (its tail tentacles snagging a crust of bread along the way). “The place on the hike’s mostly for showing the traditional ways but a lot of the local community is working on this now, apparently.”

“No kidding,” Stiles says, taking the phone and swiping through a glossy slideshow. He hears a thoughtful ‘hmm’ at his shoulder and tilts the screen so Peter can see too. “They aren’t even using prosthetics. Or make-up.”

“Yeah, I asked about that, the CRM said those are really expensive and they took a vote on it three years ago and decided they’d rather put that money towards international marketing, so they just tell everybody that it’s a rare strain of benign facial tumors.” Scott settles back in his seat and starts eating again. “They actually ended up being eligible for nonprofit grants that way.”

Allison looks impressed. “Huh. Maybe we should come up with some kind of disease to explain omegas in the preserve. Dad says it’s getting a lot harder to get business expense tax breaks for all the tasers we go through.” 

“Well, but then wouldn’t you have to let them stay?” Stiles says.

“Oh, right,” Allison says, sighing. “Laura wouldn’t like _all_ of them…but we still should definitely ask about these nonprofit grants, Scott.”

“Sure, I was actually going to visit them while you were at your interviews, but we can reschedule for their night shift. Or just go again, I wouldn’t mind. They were really curious about how our Nemeton handles bones, since running an incinerator’s hard on their lungs,” Scott says. He looks attentive as she takes out her phone, presumably to figure out where they need to schedule that, and then he frowns and suddenly looks up behind Stiles, his eyes bleeding red. “Hey.”

They’re in a corner, and dark is falling and the restaurant windows are catching headlights from the nearby road, but even so, there’s only so much you can do with blaming the lighting. Also, Stiles would rather not lean on his dad’s job on his first day in town for clean-up, so he immediately stands up to block the view from the rest of the tables and. “Where’s Peter?” he says, blinking at the empty seat next to him. “And—did he and Derek go to the bathroom?”

“I thought Derek did, but Peter went the other way, actually,” Allison mutters. Her phone is gone and both her hands are under the table and then Stiles hears the discreet _thunk-click_ of some kind of weapon. “They headed out the back. Parking lot?”

Scott’s at least slouched down so that his head probably isn’t visible above the top of the booth, eyes distant as he listens to something. “Yeah, not fighting, just…is somebody out there? Did you see something?” Pause. “I can come—no, it’s just Stiles is—okay, I’ll tell him. They’re, uh, they’re coming back and they said it’s no big deal. Just taking a break.”

Stiles raises his eyebrows. “A break from what? Our sparkling dinner conversation?”

“Peter says he’s sorry,” Scott relays. Not looking that convinced, but he’s getting that uncomfortable look of somebody hoping he’s not stuck in the middle of a relationship spate. “He lost track of time, and the night sky is really pretty from the back, and—”

“It’s better from here, I mean, that’s specifically why I asked for the _canyon-side_ windows,” Stiles says suspiciously. And then he spots Peter’s smile doing its best to charm him from across the room and leaves off poor Scott. “So have we changed our mind about the proper time to terrify the locals?”

“Stiles,” Peter starts as soon as he’s near enough to lean over the booth and have his breath riffle Stiles’ ear in a really distracting way.

But actually it’s Derek who takes the explanation load on. “He was just telling me it’s this thing called a nightgaunt and they just look like they’re giant killer bats. I saw one over the parking lot when I was coming out of the bathroom,” he says, dropping loudly back into his seat. He pulls his plate over and starts forking up the rest of his porkchop. “I guess people are just used to seeing that kind of thing around here?”

“Well, there are thunderbird legends and a huge local trade in Hollywood UFO-spotting that helps a lot, but usually they’re not supposed to be just flying around. I mean, unless somebody was riding it?” Stiles says, frowning and taking his phone out. 

Shaking his head, Peter sits down again. “No, no rider, but it didn’t seem to be particularly interested in anything on the ground, and it did start off towards the campus right before we came back. There is a very pleasant breeze running this way, so perhaps it just wanted to stretch its wings?”

“I’ll send in a report anyway, see if the team wants to do anything about it,” Stiles says, but he’s starting to think it was just a false alarm too. Nightgaunts _are_ around, and not every eldritch horror is immediately going to start a massacre, and also, Derek and Peter both came back looking and sounding completely unruffled by it. If anything, Derek sounds curious, in a grumpy kind of way, and he usually gets turned off by eldritch stuff. “But yeah, probably. Or it’s a messenger one, if it’s on the smaller side—when they’re younger, you can use them kind of like carrier pigeons.”

“For mail?” Derek says, glancing up. “That’s faster?”

Stiles shakes his head. “More like, sometimes you have languages that are hard to use on electronic devices, because when you do, your phone becomes a portal to Yog-Sothoth. Parchment’s cheaper to proof against that.”

“On the other hand, you have to go through the trouble of training a nightgaunt, and then keeping a stock of its preferred food on hand. So I do question how much of a cost savings it really is,” Peter says, and then he takes a nice, long drink of his beer so when Stiles turns to eye him, it’s all flexing throat and taut pink lips around the rim.

“They don’t eat that much, and we’ve got a meat freezer anyway, and it just seems like a weird thing for you to be squeamish over,” Stiles says. Still looking. Because damn it.

“What do they eat, exactly?” Allison semi-whispers.

“It’s not that, it’s then we’d have to have a place with a balcony and Peter thinks there are too many ways to break in as is,” Derek tells her. And then, when Peter shoots him an annoyed look, he gets kind of smirky without actually smirking and stares back while chewing on a mouthful of beans. “Plus he doesn’t like having pet food in with his food. Laura took in a stray cat for a month when we were kids, and he’d flip out if she put the bowls in the dishwasher with our bowls.” 

“Forgive me if I have an accurate grasp of how cross-contamination works,” Peter huffs. “Or a lack of appreciation for the taste of industrially-processed tuna, since none of you _ever_ remembered to scrape them off first.”

So it looks like they’re back to status quo, and once Stiles gets the report off, he turns his phone to vibrate and settles in for a nice, relaxing night out. Well…Scott’s a little quiet, actually, and Stiles glances over to see if the other man’s still embarrassed from earlier, but he seems okay too. He might not be saying anything, but he’s definitely following the conversation, looking intently back and forth between Derek and Peter and yeah, okay, Stiles probably needs to jump in again because just letting those two top each other with humiliating family stories is…not going to move the relationship goals forward. Research over people, Stiles reminds himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As tightly associated as H.P. Lovecraft is with New England, he actually co-wrote two stories set in Oklahoma and one in Missouri with Zealia Bishop that I'd classify firmly as Weird West. The Oklahoma stories feature a regional snake-god called Yig. Warning: these three balance considerably-less-than-Lovecraft-standard neurotic characterization with considerably more blatant racism and misogyny (despite the female co-writer, yeah, I know).
> 
> Ghouls in the Cthulhu Mythos have doglike features and eat corpses. They live underground and depending on which story/author you read (and how much they share Lovecraft's complete hatred of urban life and infrastructure), can be subhuman monsters to sympathetic, more intelligent than humans, anti-heroes. I'm going more with the latter than the former. The title of this story is a play on the ghoul-centric _Pickman's Model_ story.
> 
> Nightgaunts are sort of alien pterodactyl-type things, which can be ridden. 
> 
> Joint snakes aren't real, or Lovecraft inventions. They're American folklore.


	3. Chapter 3

Later that night, once they’ve all gone back to their rooms for the night, Stiles settles down on the couch to go over his notes and his game plan for the next couple weeks and make sure nothing’s left out, or forgotten, or tried to morph itself into a manifesto for unleashing murderous Cthulhic entities into the world, as sometimes happens when you try to accurately cite to the _Necronomicon_. Peter’s disappeared into their bedroom for a full post-travel grooming routine, which will keep him busy for at least an hour and a half—not that that makes the room off-limits. On the contrary, Stiles has a standing invite for those sessions, but taking it up never really gets anything _clean_.

The sex is Stiles’ reward for making sure that the Institute’s librarians don’t shortchange him on his vault access time, he tells himself, doubling down on his work, and then he hears a noise. He looks up as somebody comes across the room.

It’s Derek, who’s finally ditched the leather coat and who has his shoulders hunched up as if he—okay, to be fair, Stiles thinks the vague stiffness around the guy’s posture has more to do with him trying to move so Stiles can actually hear him coming. Mostly. Except for that attempt to roll his shoulders under phantom cool-guy armor. “Are you looking for something?” Stiles asks him, since he’s paused at the far end of the couch.

Derek thinks for a second, then shrugs and sits down. He looks around a bit, then adjusts himself so that he’s slouching back. Another pause, and then he puts his feet up on the coffee table and faces the TV.

“Oh, right,” Stiles says, and digs the skylight remote out from where it’s half-submerged between the cushions. He starts to press a button, catches himself, and flips it right-way around. Then he points it up at the skylight. “So I’m not going to get eaten now.”

“What?” Derek says sharply, and then he looks up as the shutter starts to whine shut. He frowns at it, then obviously recalls their earlier talk. “You can leave it open.”

Stiles looks at him. He keeps looking at the skylight, and then he tilts his head down, does a chin-tuck, and looks at the TV instead. “I also have my phone,” Stiles says. “You know, if the lasers and the protective runes on the roof fail.”

“I’m not sitting here because I think something’s going to break in and eat you,” Derek mutters. Then his eyes flick over and drop from Stiles’ face to Stiles’ laptop. “Erica sent me that video where Boyd and Cora carry a dead deer back and forth behind you and you don’t notice till a hoof falls off and hits your keyboard.”

“Well, what are you teaching betas in Beacon Hills anyway, you don’t carve up your dinner in the same place somebody’s trying to research Pnakotic summoning circles,” Stiles says, wrinkling up his nose. “Do they _want_ to end up janitors in sunken R’lyeh?”

Derek shrugs again. “I’m not the one whose job it is to teach them.”

He’s usually not really one for snooty superiority—his other issues aside, when it comes to facial expressions, he does seem to have a good idea of what works for him and what doesn’t—but he is really showing the family resemblance to Peter right now. And Stiles is more than a little attracted to said family, no lie, but also, it’s annoying. “Yeah, sure, and _you’re_ also not the one who thinks I’m going to get eaten by nightgaunts coming in through the skylight. I bet that whole argument back in the parking lot was just about who got dibs first on mauling one.”

When Stiles says ‘parking lot,’ Derek twitches slightly, and the little undertone of smugness to the man’s face goes away. He glances at the bedroom and his shoulders move forward like he’s going to sit up, and then he makes a face and…shifts a couple inches closer to Stiles. Still with his legs straight out on the coffeetable, and back to looking at the TV. It’s like he’s sidling, except without the implied _desire_ to move that way.

“Look, I just—” Derek stops himself. Looks like he’s reconsidering going for Peter, and then he sighs. Finally turns his head and fully looks at Stiles, and he walks around all the time with those cheekbones and jawline perfectly molded for arrogant asshole brush-off, and then you get him full-on and suddenly remember he’s also got big dark eyes that could probably guilt a puppy into giving up its kibble, if Derek didn’t think punching should always be privileged over guilt-tripping. “Nightgaunts actually don’t look that freaky, compared to some stuff Scott’s dragged in from the woods. Some _people_. And Peter just thinks that Scott being here automatically raises the chances that we’re going to get attacked when we’re not looking.”

It’s not exactly an apology, but it might be an olive branch. If plucked from a tree planted atop a dead grudge-holding wizard previously initiated into certain twisted dark arts, whose corpse’s nutrients have contorted the wood into unusual shapes. Fortunately, that’s the _least_ you need to know about Miskatonic’s landscaping department. “Does this also have to do with alpha stuff, and both of you still, um, transitioning away from Laura?”

Derek starts to look annoyed again, and makes a visible effort to just keep it to his eyebrows. “Scott’s never even tried to be our alpha—he knows better, I’ll give him that. And I was living away from her before Peter did.”

“I’m just working through some stuff Peter gave me on pack spin-offs,” Stiles says, sinking a little beneath his laptop. He knows Derek’s not going to hurt him—not when he’s not plausibly possessed, anyway—but he also knows he’s still catching up on werewolf lore, and he tries not to be that guy who lectures people on their own culture (a really good check on privilege is the Mi-go’s tendency to just archive anybody who looks like they know a lot _and_ can’t stop talking about it). “Okay, so we’re just gonna go with denning jokes.”

On the other hand, Derek’s prickliness can be just—frustrating. Stiles picked up that it was a defensive mechanism before romantic interests even came into the picture, but…yeah. And sometimes Stiles gets tired of translating the attitude all the time.

“It’s not…just that,” Derek says, his tone a little softer. His expression stays irritated a little longer, and then he huffs out a breath and slides down till his head is resting on the back of the couch. He stares up at the skylight. “Look, I think I just need…after I get out and walk around tomorrow and get used to how this place looks, I’ll…feel more…used to it. And Peter knows this is really important for your research. He’s told me that plenty of times.”

Stiles shifts too, because his thigh is going numb, and that bumps up his laptop screen into his line of sight. His notes catch his eye and he remembers he was in the middle of rethinking one of his interlibrary loan requests and…then he just hits ‘save’ and figures if he doesn’t get to it tonight, sleeping on it might not be the worst idea in the world. “I’m going to be inside all day, you could drive around. You could even just daytrip if you wanted,” he says. “I mean, look, it’s nice you came too, but if Peter’s just looking for another hand with the bodies, well, first I told him not when—”

A smile briefly tweaks the side of Derek’s mouth. Then he turns his head towards Stiles. “I’m fine. It’s not like I have a job booked, and Peter’s not that bad.”

“Yeah, okay.” After another second, Stiles lifts his laptop and then scoots himself over to Derek so that they’re right next to each other. He watches Derek not move, then puts his laptop down. “You know you don’t have to fake like you’re into my research as much as Peter is.”

“Well, good, because I’m not. Tentacles are the last thing I ever want to wake up to, and I don’t know how Scott keeps from jumping every time that pet of his dives down the front of his shirt,” Derek says. He does lift his arm then, the one between him and Stiles, but just so that he can lay it across his chest. Then he raises it further, briefly tousling his hair before hooking it over the back of the couch. “I’m not going to touch that thing. I don’t _want_ to touch it. I just don’t get why everybody thinks it’s adorable. Erica has an Etsy store selling little knitted versions, did anybody tell you?”

Stiles blinks. “Erica knits?”

“No, Isaac,” Derek says. “But it’s her shop. I have no idea, don’t really want to.”

Well, he might have the willpower, but Stiles doesn’t, and Stiles immediately brings up the page on his laptop. They’re actually crochet amigurumi versions of Quint and they’re really detailed, with several sizes available. One even comes with a tiny squid clutched between its front paws.

“Ghouls aren’t that bad,” Derek says after a moment. “I never heard of nightgaunts before this trip, but I’ve always heard ghouls deal with hunters themselves, which makes them better than half the alphas I’ve met.”

“Wait, what?” Stiles says, finishing off his order for a stocking stuffer for his dad. “As in you’ve heard of ghouls before this?”

Derek blinks in surprise. “Peter didn’t tell you? Yeah, werewolves and ghouls—we used to get mistaken for each other, way back. Still sometimes do, by the dumber hunters.”

Stiles’ notes _totally_ are not the most interesting thing in this room. “He did _not_ tell me, though admittedly, they’re not part of the research and only came up ‘cause they’re part of the curriculum for the program Allison’s looking at and so do you talk? Is there inter-community discussion in addition to this folklore confusion? Do you _knowledge-share_ about hunters—oh, um. I.”

Am now about a third on Derek, laptop still jittering a little on the coffee table where it’s landed, staring down at a bemused werewolf who thankfully doesn’t seem to mind grabby hands on his shoulders. “I don’t really know that much, there weren’t any up by Beacon Hills, so far as I can remember,” Derek says. “But Peter probably knows some, they sound like his type of people.”

“What, because they’re constantly disrespected even though they know everything, and will tell you so after they finally finish that hole they’re secretly digging under your feet?” Stiles says.

Now Derek gets tense. “Wait, so Peter’s _not_ just paranoid about that?”

“Oh, come on, we’re on the _third_ floor, that was the whole point! That and the moonlight,” Stiles sighs, starting to shift off the man.

Something touches his side, sort of towards his back. It’s not much, just a tap, and he almost ignores it, except at the same time Derek makes a little noise and it’s not one of his many variations on grunt or snarl. So Stiles pauses and takes a good look at Derek, and Derek stares up at him, and Stiles…wasn’t actually climbing on Derek for reasons besides just an instinctive attempt to stop the information source from going away. But he stops anyway.

Derek breathes in a little more deeply than normal, and his hand kind of stays on Stiles’ waist. Not really settling there, he’s not holding Stiles, but it’s there and apparently on purpose. “You know, I pointed that out to him,” he says after a long moment. “When I saw the reservation. He emailed Lydia anyway. And got that portable scanning thing.”

“Well, he’s a grown man and a born werewolf, and as much as I love his way with a Von Junzt quotation, I think he can decide who he wants to sell off parts of his eternal soul to,” Stiles says, shaking his head. Still sitting on Derek. Who appears to be okay with it.

The thing is, Stiles now has one hand off Derek’s shoulder, because that moved before Derek stopped him, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Because honestly, that’s the hardest thing to figure out with Derek and this whole dating thing: when it’s okay to get with the hands, or the arms, or just body contact in general. Talking to Derek, okay, he’s grumpy but Stiles has learned a few ways to work through that. But the guy’s body language is always basically this-is- _my_ -space, whereas Peter usually makes your choices all about how NSFW you’re up for, and so the couple times Stiles has made actual contact, it’s always been accidental and then noticing Derek’s cool with the accident and that’s great but one, he’s not a natural molester (despite Peter’s best reverse psychology tactics) and two, who in their right mind non-consensually touches a healthy conscious werewolf?

Anyway. Stiles has this hand out in limbo. He waves it a little, in the forlorn hope that movement will make him notice that less. “That’s a thought, actually. You could go meet the ghouls with Scott. I mean, if you want to, and that was in no way a hint to babysit Scott because yes, he’s my friend, but I also know how you feel about that.”

Derek is giving Stiles’ hand an odd look, but he’s still relaxed under Stiles. “Honestly, one of us probably should. Allison’s got meetings too, right?”

“You don’t have to,” Stiles repeats.

“Yeah, well, I’ll be out anyway, and if something does go down, the ghouls might not be bad to know, with their hunter record. Maybe if I run into him,” Derek says. Then he goes stiff and his head turns towards the bedroom.

“Thinking about potential allies, I’m impressed,” Peter says from the doorway. Shirtless and scrubbing at damp hair with a towel, and he is totally angling himself to catch the kitchen light on his skin and he always does that _smirk_ when he catches Stiles staring. But then he shifts off the jamb and comes over, motioning with his hand as Derek starts to get up. “No, no, don’t stop just because of me. I’m genuinely interested in this plan to safeguard McCall from his interventionist tendencies.”

As much as Stiles tries to stay neutral, given the amount of backstory he wasn’t personally around for, he doesn’t like hearing either side badmouth the other. “You remember they’re trying to _get_ Allison to come here, right?” he says, flopping back as Peter swans his way up to the couch. “The university does keep an eye on megalomaniacs and things like that.”

“Oh, yes, never would do to miss out on a potential donor,” Peter says. He gives his hair a last rub and then expertly flicks the towel under his arm, getting it out of the way as he leans down over Stiles. “Where _would_ the library be if they didn’t have all those deathbed bequests ensuring rare evil-spawing books are properly preserved for the next reincarnation?”

“Hey, Dad has a taskforce specifically for improving the admissions screening, that’s only happened twice since he got put in—I mean once. That other one, that was carryover and okay, really?” Stiles says.

“Really what?” says Peter’s dewy, still-flushed-from-the-shower pectorals to Stiles’ face. Because Peter can’t just lean into Stiles’ face like a normal person and Stiles—Stiles kind of—

Stiles is hanging in the air with empty space under his ass. He yelps and flails for a handhold before he falls on his face, only for his elbow to collide with somebody _else’s_ face. Derek makes a more nasally grunt than usual and lets go of Stiles’ waist, so Stiles drops back onto him just in time for Peter to grab Stiles’ shoulders, steady him, and then drop onto the couch beside them with an annoyed growl.

“And here I thought you were showing signs of finesse,” Peter mutters, arm sliding down around Stiles.

“Yeah, well, you’d know better, right,” Derek mutters back. He twists away, grunts like his nose has healed from whatever Stiles did to it, and then straightens up and puts his hand on the couch arm like he’s going to lever himself out from under Stiles.

Well, there goes the mood, Stiles thinks, confused and annoyed and only just now realizing that Derek had been literally trying to dump him on Peter. He’s not even close to making up his mind about whether he’s going to be offended by that when Peter suddenly snakes an arm behind him and gloms onto Derek’s shoulder.

“Stop giving up the moment you start improving,” Peter says.

Derek tugs at his arm some, giving Peter a not-entirely-getting-it look, but then he subsides. Still not really _giving_ his arm to Peter, but there’s some silent negotiating going on, judging by the head-tilting and squinting, and then Stiles remembers negotiating requires give on both ends and turns around to check out Peter. Only then Derek abruptly slouches back into place, slightly unbalancing Stiles in the process, and this time Stiles doesn’t get any assistance with that.

It’s not like he’s in danger of getting knocked to the floor or anything like that, there just are too many knees digging into the same thigh for a second, and by the time he gets that fixed, Peter’s handing him his laptop. “So tell me about our plan to stalk Scott into innocuousness?”

“We’re _not_ stalking Scott, and anyway it was Derek—and hey! Ghouls! You didn’t tell me!” Stiles says.

“Oh?” Peter says, brows arched, bemused expression on his face, absently fluffing his towel in his hands so it keeps catching Stiles’ eye and making him look down the other man’s bare chest.

“He wants to know about werewolves and them hanging out,” Derek says.

Peter absorbs that, and then reassesses Stiles’ glower, which is mostly directed at his face. “ _Oh_ ,” he says, with genuine chagrin. “Oh, yes, that. That would be interesting to you, wouldn’t it?”

Stiles just. Stiles. Just. Nothing in the Carnacki monographs on trans-astral vibrations have _anything_ on his scream right then, honestly.

* * *

Anyway, that’s pretty much the rest of the night, Peter and Derek filling him in on all the ways that werewolf and ghoul cultures have casually intersected over the centuries, to the point that they have _racist jokes_ about each other. Not that either Peter or Derek tell him those for any reason besides anthropological ones, because Peter’s classier than that and Derek, well, Derek doesn’t know them well enough to be clear on where the punchlines are supposed to be and just doesn’t care that he doesn’t know that kind of thing. But the point is, this is poorly-researched territory and Stiles is _this_ close to just ditching his hypothesis on the Nemeton and coming up with a new one. Except then he falls asleep in the middle of taking notes, because it was kind of a long drive down and Peter’s comfortable to lean into, and now that night’s fallen it’s actually a bit chilly, so having Derek nearby is a nice heat source for his other side.

When he wakes up, it’s still night, and they’ve moved to the bedroom—all three of them. Derek…very definitively wants to keep his own room and bed, but occasionally he’ll turn up clamped to the edge of Stiles and Peter’s bed like an especially handsome barnacle. Usually when he or Peter have gotten an upsetting call from Beacon Hills, so it does cross Stiles’ mind to crawl over Peter and check his phone if anything’s gone down.

But when that’s the case, neither he nor Peter actually _sleep_ , and right now they’re both very much asleep: Derek making low whuffing noises that is absolutely not the werewolf equivalent of cat sleep-chattering, Peter with his head tucked into Stiles’ neck and one hand loosely dipping into the back of Stiles’ PJs. So Stiles figures it’s cool, and maybe they’re just making some progress with Derek’s dating issues, and goes back to sleep himself.

The next time he wakes up, it’s morning and Peter’s not in bed and Derek still is. Which, while unusual, is not immediately alarming—Peter can be a morning person if it furthers his agenda—so Stiles rolls out of bed and does his usual bathroom routine and then goes into the common area. No Peter.

No note either, paper or text or anything, but halfway through messaging Peter, Stiles hears familiar voices in the hall. He wanders out and…still no Peter.

“Hey, good morning!” Scott calls, spotting him from where the other man is sitting on the openwork staircase to the first floor. He pulls off his shoe, then twists around to face Stiles. “Did you just get up?”

“Um, yeah, so…hike was fun, I’m guessing?” Stiles says.

Allison’s leaning against the rail next to Scott, holding Quint in her cupped hands. She starts to nod and then has to duck behind Quint’s drooping tentacles to hide the yawn. “Yeah, it was great!” Scott beams, oblivious to how both his girlfriend and his pet squirrel are squinting at him with almost hangover-level dislike of the volume of his voice. “The guide was really good and I think the way they integrated the trail into the habitats was really cool, even though you do have to shut your eyes sometimes so the angles don’t make you sick, but they really went through a lot of trouble to minimize environmental disruption. We talked a lot with the ghouls about that, erosion and subsidence and they brought up all this interesting stuff about soil science, Stiles. Alan’s gonna love them.”

“That’s…cool,” Stiles says. He supports the enthusiasm, absolutely, it’s just…maybe it’s him getting all of that while still trying to figure out Peter’s next move before having his first coffee but something just seems wrong in there. Maybe the part about a druid loving a species that traditionally expanded the gene pool via changeling, even if these days they promise to stick to official adoption channels. “So he can talk about the Nemeton with them?”

“Oh, no, I was more thinking because he just likes gardening in general, and they’re branching out of their funeral service business into that because of all the compost they’ve built up, plus they live underground so they have landscaping expertise too,” Scott cheerfully rattles on, shaking some sand out of his shoe. When he’s done, he puts it back on and then takes Quint from Allison, who startles a little before her eyes open enough to remember who he is. “But we do go through a lot of compost with the tree, now that you mention it. Maybe we can get some shipped up.”

“I think we should send samples for testing first,” Allison breaks in, nicely, and still sounding like she’d really rather stuff her face into a pillow. “Make sure there aren’t enough body parts still in it to trigger anything weird with the Nemeton. Even before you talk about it copying Cthulhu, there’s the darach factor to worry about, remember?”

Scott’s face falls a little. “Oh, right. Yeah, good point, I’ll mention that to Alan too.”

“Well, even if the compost doesn’t work, he might still want to talk to them about the landscaping,” Allison offers, starting to look regretful. “That does come up a lot after we’ve had a fight in the preserve, and God knows Laura hasn’t managed to get her pack to learn how to help Dad with that.”

“Darach?” Stiles says. The word is vaguely ringing a bell, but he has a feeling it came up in his freshman survey of indigenous non-antediluvian magical traditions, which Miskatonic mostly offers to weed out the occasional idiot who doesn’t read the admitted-student handbook and thinks they’re there to be a wand-swishing wizard. He _should’ve_ tested out of that class, but some bullshit about nepotism meant he had to take it anyway (pass/fail, so he could spend his lectures reviewing his notes for his entirely legit Basic Antiquarian Mental Barriers class). “Those are evil druids, right? And I guess they’re not good for Nemetons?”

Allison blinks at him. “Peter and Derek haven’t told you about that time?”

Or maybe Stiles heard it in context of some terrible thing everybody in Beacon Hills went through while he was off learning how to make sure he didn’t allow a long-dead evil sorcerer to trick him into resurrecting them into his own body. Which kind of happens a lot, not that he’s the type of asshole to resent not having that as a mutual experience, and any stories to tell are other people’s so he’s not going to be the type of asshole who pushes either. But it just…comes up a lot. And reminds him that he wasn’t around for it, because his family had left.

“Gone over what?” says Peter’s voice from the first floor. When Stiles looks down, Peter’s just come into the building, a big paper sack cradled in one arm, carrying the wafting aromas of gourmet coffee and melted chocolate and fresh butter-golden pastry with him.

Furthering his agenda, which includes ensuring that he maintains a certain standard of first-world amenities at all times. The world is consistent again, and Stiles can stop monitoring his peripheral hearing for the lilting, insidious melody of Nyarlathotep’s flute. “What a darach is, and how this inevitably is going to lead to a story about how Beacon Hills High was a complete death-trap despite not being located on a dimensional rift, owning a copy of the _Necronomicon_ , or having a recurring evil wizard or witch haunting it,” Stiles says, sliding past Scott and Allison to meet Peter coming up the stairs. “Is that Nutella I smell?”

“Having my grandfather as the principal doesn’t count?” Allison ponders. “He went two whole semesters before we figured out how to get rid of him.”

“I think Stiles means when they come back by possessing somebody,” Scott says.

“Well, then shouldn’t we count…” Allison starts.

“It is indeed, and it’s in the pastry and in the latte,” Peter says, smiling. He goes up one step more than Stiles was thinking he would, so that Stiles ends up pushing into him. Which apparently was the plan, from the way he not-so-subtly leans into Stiles’ panicked grab at him. “The grab ‘n go selection at the bodega in this building was entirely unacceptable.”

Stiles doesn’t exactly mind a good handful of Peter’s biceps, but they are in a staircase that’s open to the entire first floor, and he’s kind of well-known as his dad’s kid in Miskatonic circles. And people kind of have this habit of letting his dad know whenever Stiles is behaving in too ‘degenerate’ a manner because he’s showing off his actual personal non-blackmailed or -brainwashed or -linked by some horrific past incident relationships. Which, not that Stiles buys into Miskatonic’s weird moral standards (seriously, free love with Deep Ones is cool but not nontraumatic friendships?), but his dad gets enough emails as it is. “Yeah, really?” he says, hooking one hand around Peter’s arm and then tugging him up the stairs. “Like they had fake dairy creamer?”

“As in they were advertising steel-cut oatmeal when a blind man could’ve told them those were rolled. And on top of that, I could smell that they hadn’t cleaned their espresso machine properly, and I do _not_ care for yesterday’s rancid residue in my mocha,” Peter sniffs. He tilts the bag so that Stiles can start digging into it, then takes up a lazy slouch against the doorway to their suite, sipping his ‘acceptable’ coffee and occasionally smiling whenever Stiles gets chocolate on his fingers and has to lick it off. “Is Derek still in bed?”

Stiles shrugs, and probes extra-obviously under his fingernail with his tongue for Peter’s appreciation. Hey, the guy got up early. Sure, it’s probably as much about wanting to talk Stiles into bending the archive rules for Miskatonic affiliates as it is about ensuring food quality, but either way Stiles does credit Peter for effort put in. “Yeah, seemed peaceful so I just let him be,” he mutters around his finger. “Did you need him?”

“No,” Peter says, and something about the way he does that makes Stiles look up.

Because he sounds like he’s not paying attention, and when Stiles finger-sucking is on the table, Peter is generally calling dibs on all the front-row seats. So why he and Scott are giving each other the eye—Peter catches himself and gives the other man a little dismissive jerk of the head as he turns back to Stiles. Then proffers the bag again, smiling.

“Did you want another before Derek got into them? No? Well, all right, but there is one more with the Nutella filling, and I could reserve it for your later convenience, if you want,” Peter says, in the kind of low, slightly breathy tone you’d expect from someone selling you something where they take either cash or Bitcoin. “I’ll just…leave it in your lunch pack in the fridge, in that case.”

“Did I actually consent there, or were you just hoping implication was going to get you through the door…and there you go, making things unnecessarily literal,” Stiles says as Peter waltzes his way back into the suite. He looks after the man for a second—what, Peter’s back view is _fantastic_ —and then gives himself a good shake. “Well, all right, then—”

“Stiles?” Scott says.

“Hmm?” When he looks over, Scott’s still got that expression on his face, where something’s concerning him but he clearly isn’t sure enough about it to be rude enough to bring it up. At least, not directly, but he’ll gesture hopefully so that Stiles wanders his way while giving Allison a quick look. “What’s up?”

Allison doesn’t seem to have any more idea than Stiles does, but she is taking Scott’s expression seriously enough that she tucks Quint away in a pocket and then moves so that her and Scott’s arms are brushing against each other. Scott glances at her, then looks back at Stiles. Then past Stiles for a moment, at the door to Stiles’ suite.

“It’s probably not a big deal, just…I thought Laura called ahead, worked something out with the local pack,” Scott says slowly, his eyes not quite back to Stiles. The center of their focus keeps shifting towards the door. “That’s what she told Mom, anyway, or else I would’ve checked too.”

“No, she did, she and Dad were both on the call because there’s a local hunter family here too, and part of the deal was Dad was going to mediate a dispute with them and the pack so it’d be over before we got here,” Allison says. She steps back from Scott, but only to pat at whatever weapon she’s got packed into the backpack slung over her shoulder. “Did somebody get into a fight?”

Scott immediately shakes his head, but things clearly still aren’t settled for him. “Not that I know of. Sorry, it’s just for a second I thought I smelled…but maybe it was just an accident or something like that. Anyway, I should wash off before I get dust over everything, but we’re meeting up again for dinner, right?”

“Yeah, that was the plan.” Stiles says. He’s going to leave it at that, because look, it’s early in the morning and only day two of their trip and there’s no reason to _go_ looking for tension, and then. Well, he’s a Miskatonic graduate student, his future career depends on poking things that probably are going to open up into unexpected abysses. “Peter usually goes for the flat whites when he’s just messed with somebody, but if it makes you feel better, I can—”

“It’s not—whatever Laura knows, he’d know too. I’m not trying to get in the middle of their—whatever they’re doing,” Scott says firmly. A little too firmly, as if yet again, Stiles has wandered into some old argument, and the way Allison is pressing her lips together pretty much confirms that. Then Scott musters up one of those smiles of his, where he genuinely thinks he can will everybody into a better mood, and…he’s not exactly off-base with that. It is pretty powerful, that sincerity of his. “Just, if they need help, I’m around.”

“I don’t think anything’s up, but thanks, will keep that in mind,” Stiles says. He smiles back at Scott and it actually seems to reassure the other man, which makes Stiles feel…awkward, since really, he’s not doing anything, or providing any information. But there’s not really much else to say so…he just moves on. “So dinner. I know my schedule says that last meeting ends at six, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be before that, so I’ll text you?

Allison and Scott agree that that’ll work, and then head into their suite to brush up before Allison formally starts her recruiting visit. Stiles doesn’t miss the way Scott gives one more worried glance over the shoulder, and so when he walks into his rooms, he doesn’t hesitate to jab Peter in the elbow.

“So what happened to giving them a chance to recognize your superiority?” he says, coming up behind the other man, who’s standing by the kitchenette counter. “Or is competing over who trolls the barista better how you whip it out in the Southwest?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Derek, standing at the opposite end of the corner, looks up from his half-eaten slice of Nutella-slathered coffeecake. Then he grimaces and visibly dials down the hulking werewolf menace, maybe because the lidless paper cup in front of him is already half-empty. “I mean I honestly do not understand what you just said.”

By now Peter’s turned around and he looks just as puzzled, though he takes a quick break from that to shoot Derek a good-now-I-don’t-have-to-slaughter-your-ego glance. “Has someone complained about me?” he says. His brows belatedly start to arch. “Because let me assure you, Stiles, whatever they’ve—”

“Um, no, just…werewolf turf posturing? Which is an integral part of your communication style and I’m absolutely not disparaging it, I just analogize badly to human cultural rituals up to my third coffee?” Stiles tries. He can feel the burn starting to creep past his shirt-collar. “So. Talking about taking on the local pack last night. You, um, you mentioned you might.”

“Oh… _oh_ ,” Peter says, looking amused. “Oh, no, I honestly only went out and bought breakfast, Stiles. Not even a whiff of a challenger. I know I said that, but we did reach out beforehand and there shouldn’t be any turf posturing, it’s all already been arranged. And while that will make this trip a _little_ less exciting, I think I can find other ways to compensate for the loss. Why, was Scott worrying over it?”

Derek snorts and resumes eating his coffeecake. “He’s probably just smelling the fear on this—” he motions towards the bag of food “—from whatever you said you’d do if they screwed up your order.”

“Actually, Derek, sometimes all you need is an eye for competence,” Peter snipes back. “Of course, this also requires a certain degree of patience, which I suppose is why you distrust the idea so much.” 

The two of them keep bickering, but it’s everyday bickering, nothing alarming. And they’d both genuinely looked surprised at the idea that Peter might have been tangling with another werewolf—which is a little unfair, considering that’s Peter’s third-favorite hobby, after learning esoteric magic and crafting multi-layered innuendo. So…Scott wouldn’t comment on nothing, but Stiles just isn’t seeing anything here.

Well, Stiles finally figures, he’ll just keep an eye on it, and if he gets another weird vibe, he’ll ask. Till then, no point in ruining the trip this early, and he’s been that guy enough times to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Occasionally Lovecraft dabbled in more traditional gothic stories, like _The Tree_ , where an unusual tree springs from the body of a dead sculptor who had revenge on his mind at the time of death, and then things play out a lot like William Blake's 'A Poison Tree.'
> 
> The Mi-go (see Lovecraft's _The Whisperer in Darkness_ ) are aliens who extract people's brains, store them while still conscious in metal tubes, and who then upload their own consciousness into the body, all for science! 
> 
> In the Cthulhu Mythos, Von Junzt is one of those made-up researchers who wrote a bunch of cryptic yet critical texts explaining eldritch horrors and then died horribly. Michael Chabon's _The God of Dark Laughter_ has an interesting expansion on him (though Chabon didn't invent him, Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft were kicking him around way back in the day).
> 
> Usually when reincarnation shows up in Lovecraft, it means your evil wizard ancestor is going to sucker you into turning over your body to them so they can take up the evil stuff they were doing two centuries ago before the authorities caught on and tried them for witchcraft. See: _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward_.
> 
> Lovecraft's twist on ghouls was to add a changeling component, where they'd kidnap human children and indoctrinate them into the ghoul lifestyle. So if you acted like one, you eventually became one.


	4. Chapter 4

Derek and Peter stay back at the suite for the first part of the day, because Stiles has to go through on-site screening and check in with a bunch of people to confirm that one, his research goals are legit, and two, he hasn’t developed a murderous grudge against the Miskatonic faculty in the month between submitting his visiting scholar application and now. Which historically has happened at five times the rate of possession by an immortal evil sorcerer, which the university only screens for once a semester. Anyway, Stiles gets the need for it, but it’s tedious enough that even Peter, who doesn’t mind suffering a little if it gets him exclusive access to rare knowledge resources, would rather do something else, like security-proofing the guest suite.

In the couple moments of downtime he has, he looks up darachs and in the process discovers that the ban on druids at Miskatonic has really skewed the university’s perspective, since half of the posted course materials on them he finds are, once compared with the original references, obviously referring to darachs instead. Including a course taught by the worst professor he’s had to date, and when Allison runs into him, he is a gleeful three-quarters of the way into composing a pointed letter to the tenure review committee about it. 

“Oh, hey,” he hears, and looks up to see her coming into the conference room. “Are you busy? I just saw you and one of the professors here couldn’t get back from a field outing in time, so they said I could take a coffee break.”

“No, I’m just waiting on something to get rescheduled too,” Stiles says. “Have a seat.”

Allison promptly drops into the nearest one on his right, giving him a grateful smile. He must look oddly at her, because then she shakes her head. “No, I’m fine, my feet just hurt. They really hustled me around earlier.”

“I thought all your meetings were here?” Stiles says, frowning, because the Institute isn’t that big. A lot of the research here is field-based, so the campus facilities are much more scaled-down than the home campus back in Massachusetts.

“No, they are, but I think something was going on outside,” Allison says, taking her phone out and checking it. “They brought something in to the labs, I think? And then rerouted everybody around the area. You didn’t notice?”

“Well, _no_ ,” Stiles starts to sputter, because he’s kind of just _sitting here_ , which should have immediately answered that question. And then he stops because there are probably better things he could be doing than sputtering at her.

Allison looks at him for a couple seconds. Then she swings her bag around and starts to take out things and put them on the table: taser, spare battery packs, what looks like an adapter that makes the taser shoot out something longer and pointier than those little metal prongs. Stiles slightly slows down his typing on his phone.

“I’m not going to try and hurt anyone, but I just think we should go in prepared,” Allison says, holding up a leather roll-out pouch of darts and a sheathed hunting knife. She considers them both, then keeps the darts and puts the knife back into her bag. “Also we’re going. Aren’t we?”

“Of course, I just…um, thanks for waiting on me?” Stiles says.

“Well, I’m also still thinking about going here, so I figured if I go with you, we wouldn’t have to destroy much to get through security,” Allison says. She stands up and begins working on stowing her gear on various parts of her body.

Stiles gets to his feet too. He finishes pulling the latest security alerts and gives them a quick skim, then frowns. “When’s the last time you saw Scott?”

“What?” Allison snaps.

Startled, Stiles looks up just in time to catch her right in his face. He yelps and jerks back, then falls into his seat again. Allison goes for his phone, a grim, determined expression on her face, and sheer reflex makes him kick out. He doesn’t connect, she easily dodges, and instead his foot hits the table and sends his chair shooting backward till it bumps into the wall. He and she stare at each other for a second. She doesn’t look like she understands what just happened either, but in a way more stressed way than he’s feeling.

“Wait, I’m just—” Stiles reviews what he just said and belatedly realizes why Allison might react that way “—it’s not him! It’s not, it’s a ghoul, so I was just asking whether—you know, he was going to see them again, wasn’t he? I was just thinking he might’ve heard about it and texted you?”

It takes a good second for Allison to come down, and even then, she’s breathing so heavily that Stiles can _feel_ the adrenaline squeezing out of her. “Oh, so it’s not—Scott isn’t the one…”

“No, no, _no_ , I have no idea where he is.” Then Stiles realizes that that is probably not the right way to reassure a worried hunter dating a werewolf who has a history of getting literally dragged into trouble. “It’s a ghoul, they brought in a ghoul. And not to the lab, to the student clinic, because Miskatonic does _not_ chop them up or electrocute them or anything like that, okay? They wouldn’t do that to werewolves either, they know what those are and wouldn’t alienate a potential student recruitment group like that.”

Allison needs a few more deep breaths before her stance finally starts to relax. Even then, she’s moving with the exaggerated precision of someone afraid that if they go any faster, something will fly off the handle. “Okay. Okay, so a ghoul got hurt…no, Scott didn’t say anything to me about them. I didn’t notice anything either, but I was kind of sleepy…Scott _was_ going to check out that business of theirs, we decided he didn’t need to wait for me. He’s probably there right now.”

“Okay, so give him a call,” Stiles says. He gets up out of his seat, keeping his hands visible, and then goes over and grabs her bag for her. “That’s our excuse for getting into that wing anyway, the reception here is terrible.”

She frowns a little and he hastily gives her the bag back. A flicker of chagrin crosses her face, but then she just slips the strap over her shoulder and follows Stiles out the door. “What am I asking him about?”

“Just if they know anything about one of theirs getting attacked,” Stiles says, looking back at his phone. He switches over to the real-time security monitoring feed, but doesn’t see any extra guards or activated wards up. Looks like they are just treating it as a medical emergency. “A grad student coming back from the digs on the east side of town found a ghoul lying by the trail, but it just says ‘suspected attack,’ no more details than that. But if they were out during the day instead of heading back underground, they must have been really hurt.”

Allison nods and starts trying to call Scott. She works on that through them getting into an elevator, crossing a small courtyard between wings, and then ducking through a janitor’s entrance to get around reception. “Maybe he’s underground,” she mutters. “They’d have most of it in the basement, right? Even if they have a storefront?”

“Oh, yeah, but they’d have wifi, ghouls are big on technology,” Stiles says. They’re getting close enough to the clinic that he can start to hear voices and footsteps, and it definitely sounds busier than normal. “They’ll be hooked up to Miskatonic’s VPN too. I made him download the Miskatonic app so we could talk when I’m in one of the libraries, he should be able to pick up your call through that.”

“Okay, I’m trying. So I guess that’s because if you get everything delivered, you don’t have to go outside?” Allison says, looking up. She hears the hustle too, and adjusts something in her coat-sleeve that’s very taser-shaped. “Internet of Things must be great for that.”

“Yep. Ghouls make up something like seventy percent of Miskatonic’s computer science majors these days. I had this one great ghoul TA who helped me build this one,” Stiles says, showing her the attachment for scanning for Cthulhic contamination before he plugs it into his phone. “They really should just start hiring them for professorships, but that committee’s even more snobby and inbred than…oh, okay, wait, I know that nurse, I think we can just ask her.”

The area is currently devoid of people and the woman is heading for the breakroom so Stiles scrambles to get down the hall after her before anybody else comes by. He can hear Allison following him—a little slower, probably because she’s still trying to call Scott—so he dodges into a pantry nook, gets a cup of coffee and gives the creamer to Allison as she catches up, and then the two of them offer up their gifts as the nurse turns around.

She worked at the main Massachusetts campus when Stiles was growing up, but transferred out just before he started undergrad. Still, she remembers him fondly enough that once she gets over asking where his father is and what he’d think about her finding Stiles here, she’s happy to share details on her latest patient. “He’s really not too badly wounded—I’ve seen ghouls take worse and insist on going home the next night so they wouldn’t miss out on Samhain. But the paralysis is just strange, since none of the slashes are anywhere near his spine,” she muses. “Well, anyway, they’ve scrambled the chemists so I expect we’ll know soon.”

“You think it’s poison?” Stiles says. “Something that works on a ghoul?”

But that, apparently, is as far as a single cup of coffee is going to get them. “Now, Mr. Stilinski, I think that’s a question for the lab. Which you know very well isn’t my area, and you can do your own rule-breaking with that bunch,” the nurse says, shooing him and Allison out.

At that point, enough people are milling around that Stiles decides not to push his luck and have word of this get back to his dad. “Besides, if it’s toxicology, I should be hitting up the digital archives instead,” he explains to Allison as they retreat down the hall. “Ghouls are immune to nearly everything, so it’s not like there are a lot of options to consider.”

“He’s still not picking up,” Allison mutters, glaring at her phone. She sucks one side of her lip in between her teeth and chews on it, and then her face suddenly clears up. “Oh, wait, I think he just—yeah, he texted. He’s…he’s _not_ visiting the ghouls.”

Stiles looks over at her. “Really? Then where’d he go?”

“He says he made an appointment but it’s not till tomorrow, so he’s just hiking around some more,” Allison reads. “He wants to know if he and Derek should come back?”

“Derek’s with him?” Stiles asks. “Wait, he’s hiking. Like outside? And _Derek_ is with him?”

Allison shrugs helplessly. “Well, that’s what he says. Do you want to—”

“Calling him,” Stiles says, bringing up Peter’s number on his phone.

* * *

It turns out that Scott and Derek are so far out that even with werewolf speed, it makes more sense for Allison to take her rental car and drive out to pick them up. While she’s doing that, Stiles heads back to the visiting scholar suites, where Peter, at least, still is.

Peter doesn’t have any better of an explanation for why Derek would be wandering around desert scrubland with Scott, but he does insist that the man is in his right mind and isn’t possessed. “As much as it pains me to admit it, McCall is familiar with those signs and I think after the frogs, even he’d remember to mention something,” Peter sighs. “And Derek did say something about getting away from the town before he left.”

“Why, did something about dinner bother him? He’s not actually freaked out by the nightgaunts and trying to hide it, is he?” Stiles says, plopping down on the couch with his laptop for some serious ghoul biochemistry research (ghouls are technically eldritch horrors, but seeing as they’re also a source of tuition, courses on them go under eldritch cultures and Stiles’ dad put his foot down on a triple major, citing a bunch of wildly out-of-date psychological studies correlating that and insanity). “Or are these secret pack talks you didn’t want me to know about, even though I’m going to notice we are _seriously_ depleted on bloodstain-remover later?”

“Now, Stiles,” Peter starts reprovingly. He gives the nightmare fetish hanging over the headboard a last twitch, then slides onto the mattress next to Stiles. “You know Derek’s gotten far better at remembering to take his laundry back to Laura’s to clean, when he does have something left _for_ cleaning.”

Stiles pauses mis-keyword selection and looks at the man easing a chin over his left shoulder. “It is so comforting to know that you’re prioritizing his alibi-building skills over his diplomatic skills.”

“Well, at this point in our lives, I’m hardly going to waste my time on a lost cause. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and my nephew’s particular set are what they are,” Peter says, his hands working their way under Stiles’ shirt. Then he pauses. Looks at Stiles more closely, and sighs again. Doesn’t take his hands out, but doesn’t take advantage of their placement either. “He’s with Scott, Stiles. They’re not picking fights—at least, that wasn’t Derek’s goal, so far as I know. We did work out an agreement with the local pack ahead of time, so there shouldn’t be any need for a fight, or even for posturing.”

“Yeah, okay, but that doesn’t necessarily stop you. Even if you do usually remember to top up the bottle of stain remover,” Stiles says.

For a second Peter looks proud that Stiles has noticed that. Then he sighs again, and twists over so that he’s resting his head against the back of Stiles’ shoulder. “Well, I can’t speak to Derek’s exact intentions when he left, but I can say I didn’t send him out to cause any trouble.”

Stiles finishes setting up his search parameters and then puts his hands down on the keyboard. He glances over his shoulder at the top of Peter’s head. “Did you two fight?”

“I wouldn’t really call it a fight,” Peter says, with enough lingering annoyance in his voice to contradict him. 

“Was it about last night?” Stiles asks, setting his laptop aside. It’ll be a couple minutes for the results to come back anyway, and Peter just twitched oddly against him. “Seriously. He’s not more weirded out by things than he was letting on, is he? Because he seemed okay at breakfast. You know, the usual grunt-to-word ratio.”

He’s already turning around when Peter gives his waist a pull, upsetting his balance. So yeah, Stiles’ arms go up and out, and yeah, Peter expertly redirects the flail so that he lands on his back with Peter contently sprawled over the top of him. Him promptly grabbing Peter by the back of the neck just earns him an extra purr and preen.

“No, Stiles, it has nothing to do with the nightgaunts, or the ghouls. As a matter of fact, I predict Derek and Scott ran into each other because Derek decided to take his own look at the ghoul community,” Peter says. He arches a little under Stiles’ hand, settling himself, and then relaxes to rest his head on crossed arms, looking down from Stiles’ chest. “We did talk at length about how they really have quite the impressive record against hunters, and he does have this tendency to hate feeling outdone.”

“So…what, you’re telling me instead of going off to beat up other werewolves, Derek went off to see if he could throw down with some ghouls instead?” Stiles says.

Peter tilts his head. “I did tell him they don’t follow pack hierarchy lines and offered appropriate resources to confirm it, but he would insist on seeing for himself.”

“I’m not sure that untranslated digital copies of Von Junzt are really the way to go there—but okay, we know he’s alive and with Scott, so maybe they just rolled their eyes and offered to cave in a tunnel on him,” Stiles mutters, rubbing at the side of his head. Sometimes he thinks Peter and Derek aren’t in it for the sex so much as the opportunity to drive him up the wall with their counterproductive bickering. Miskatonic training proofs you against thirty different psychosis triggers in the first _semester_ , but it’s got nothing against the Hale brand of passive aggression. “Well, at least it wasn’t about the pack cuddle.”

And then Peter twitches again, and when Stiles looks up, the other man has an expression on his face like he’s not quite done pulling it down over a different one. To his credit, Peter realizes he’s been caught and only spends a second thinking about taking his shirt off to distract Stiles (it’s in the way his eyebrows want to waggle, Stiles can tell). “I don’t think it was that either,” he says, sounding noticeably less imperturbable. “Honestly, it wasn’t much of an argument. I think he knew he was—he cut things off and just said he was going to go walk it off. If I had to try and explain it, I think he’s simply edgy.”

“About what?” Stiles asks, propping himself up on his elbows. “Because I know I was snarky about it last night, but seriously, if it’d make you two more comfortable to go on the first floor, I can get that. And I can ask for night passes if you want to patrol too, though I don’t think I can pull enough strings that you wouldn’t have to go with one of Dad’s—”

“Stiles,” Peter says sharply, and then he tucks his head in a little, makes the line of his shoulders softer. He smiles too, and it’s aiming for confident and reassuring but there’s just that hint of uncertainty to it, where he’s paying way too much attention to Stiles’ reactions. “Stiles. We’re fine. Not that I don’t appreciate the…the offers, but we’re hardly hermits, we’ve traveled before. Had that _argument_ before, for that matter—we may just need a little…space, is all. Space and time, and that is what a vacation is for, isn’t it?”

“Okay.” Which Stiles says not because he thinks anything is actually resolved, but because if studying extra-dimensional humanity-destroying aliens has taught him anything, it’s that more meddling is usually not the correct answer. At least, not without more knowledge, and from what he’s learned so far, it’s that Peter and Derek both come with a ton more baggage than him. And as much as it’s killing him to sit on the sidelines, flipping out on them isn’t going to make unpacking that go any faster. “Well. Just so you know. Because my dad is head of security, and I do get certain benefits from that, and I am okay with the occasional exploitation of them for a good cause. And ghouls don’t really come with an analogous dominance structure to werewolves, but they do have a healthy curiosity about other fringe societies and I think we could spin it as some kind of diplomatic threshold communication—”

“Stiles,” Peter says, half-laughing, half-intrigued. “Stiles, really. Even for me—”

“What?” Stiles says.

His boyfriend doesn’t immediately answer, just looks at him with that kind of amused warmth in his eyes, and behind that a body that’s been unbending by degrees since Stiles started to ramble. Peter’s no longer tracking every single one of Stiles’ tells with that unearthly intentness, which is one of the few things that, no matter how much Peter might try to schmooze it away, always gives Peter away as a werewolf. Instead he just looks like he’s enjoying the conversation, no ulterior motives, and they’re fully clothed and sort of talking about serious things here and Stiles has _no_ excuse for the vibe of lust that hits him right then. No excuse, period. Peter isn’t even thinking about messing with him.

Well, till Peter sniffs a little, cocks his head, and then tugs himself up Stiles’ chest, one hand continuing to slide over Stiles’ shoulder till he’s toying with Stiles’ shirt-collar, his fingertips dipping distractingly in and out of it. “I was going to remind you,” he says, his voice dropping to cream-and-inappropriate-pudding-thoughts levels. “Ghouls are familiar enough with werewolves to understand a challenge when they see one. But it is very kind of you to think about manipulating them for our benefit.”

“Is that what we’re calling it these days?” Stiles says. He’s flushing some, he can feel the prickle in his cheeks, and he moves his hand off Peter’s nape and into the other man’s hair mostly to keep from smacking himself.

“You know, I don’t _always_ speak in double entendres,” Peter says, eyes widening in mock-sincerity.

Stiles makes a face at him, and Peter shrugs and stretches up and kisses him. And…well, whatever, it’ll save him another thirty seconds of embarrassing himself, and also, Peter’s tongue in his mouth. He’ll take it.

Peter’s hands go back down his body, then roam up his shirt again till the hot itch they’re raising under his skin gets too annoying, and he breaks their kiss to yank it over his head. Of course, Peter promptly ducks under and starts nuzzling at his chest, then works down to his stomach. One lick of the man’s tongue seems to fizz against his abdomen and he gasps, curling up around Peter’s head. Peter starts to pull away and Stiles hauls him up, kisses him, jerks roughly at the front of his jeans till it’s open and allows in a hand around the other man’s cock.

Not remotely leaving, Peter makes a pleased noise into his mouth and then rolls them over, looping an arm around Stiles’ waist as he crawls over to the edge of the bed. He crooks his neck so Stiles can lave up the side, scraping teeth along the tendon the way he likes. “Are you out of those ridiculous pants?” he mutters, digging at something on the floor.

“What, you mean like _this_?” And Stiles gives his hips a last wiggle, working his waistband down over the rise of his ass. His underwear doesn’t quite go along with his pants, but a quick yank with his free hand fixes that. “Not really so ridiculous when I can strip no-handed, is it? And yours always takes at least three hands.”

“Well, _cargo_ is certainly accurate where those sacks of khaki are concerned,” Peter snorts, coming back up with some lube. He drops it by them and then puts both hands down on the mattress and arches back like he wants Stiles’ eyes to lick the whole length of his torso, rather than like he’s actually trying to help Stiles get off those damn jeans. “And here I thought—” nuzzling at Stiles’ jaw as Stiles yanks and curses and pushes against the flex of his thighs “—you appreciated a good fit as much as I do. You certainly don’t mind my taking the lead up any stairs.”

“That is such a cheap shot,” Stiles says, or at least tries to say, before Peter kisses him again.

And it really does take three hands: both of his and then Peter’s one, bunching the denim down Peter’s legs till Stiles just gets too annoyed and pulls too hard, and loses his grip. He flops over, and since their legs are twisted together, Peter falls onto his side too. Stiles gets back onto his elbows first, because Peter’s too busy snickering at him, and just looks down and Peter’s ass-up, shirt flipped over to show a long stretch of smooth muscular back flowing away from perfect globes and. Well, fuck it, Peter’s decided to go commando today anyway, it’s like he’s saying something here, and Stiles _does_ try to be a multi-dimensional listener.

Peter stops chuckling so much when Stiles starts pumping fingers in and out of him, instead clenching his hands in the bedding before, with a sharp, hoarse gasp, flattening his fingers out. Obviously remembering that they’re in a guest room, not with their usual shred-warded sheets, and Stiles climbs over him and starts nipping up his spine as a thank-you for saving the room deposit. And then ugh, lets his fingers pop out of Peter before he or Peter are ready.

Squirted too much lube on them. They’re still slippery enough that when Peter abruptly humps himself up, Stiles tries to grab at the man’s hip and instead has his hand glide from there nearly all the way into Peter’s armpit. His face is burning _again_ with embarrassment and he would say something, except Peter’s shoving his buttocks up and they’ve semi-caught Stiles’ dick between them and that’s—yeah, good point, they should do something else besides dwelling on Stiles’ screw-ups. Also, Stiles’ little penile oddity has practical uses besides being kinky, since he still can’t get his hands around to guide anything. 

So it’s mildly clumsy, this particular round of sex. Peter seems more than okay with it, judging from the noises he makes, and turns out a great way to forget about how much you’re blushing is to pound somebody else till you kind of black out, momentarily…and come to with sweaty curls up the nose and a vaguely sore chin.

Stiles winces and starts to lift himself, only to stop when Peter squirms pointedly _into_ his cock. “C’mon, really?” he mumbles, putting his head down on Peter’s back again. “Derek ‘n Scott gonna be here any minute. And I’m supposed to—oh! The ghouls!”

“ _I’ll_ get it,” Peter says, sounding more than a little disgruntled. But he grabs Stiles’ laptop from where it’s almost skidded off the bed and pushes it back into Stiles’ reach. Then twists his arm slightly, snagging Stiles’ wrist as Stiles flips up the top. Not to get in the way, just to hold onto as Stiles checks the search results. “I don’t hear the car yet, and anyway, they’re both old enough to know to knock first and not just go by the nose.”

“You’re so snotty sometimes,” Stiles can’t help saying. He softens it with a nuzzle at the back of Peter’s skull, then lets his head rest there.

Peter’s fingers tighten a little around his wrist. Still not tight around it, and it doesn’t seem driven by anything urgent either. He moves under Stiles, stretching himself in the same casual way, and then settles back, thumb idly rubbing at one of Stiles’ wrist. 

“So it wasn’t a big fight?” Stiles says, after a moment of wondering if it’s too soon or not. “Or it just wasn’t a new one?” 

The way Peter inhales, Stiles thinks he gets that wrong, and that however much Peter loves his extra muscular gifts in the groin region, that’s not going to keep the man in place. And then Peter lets out a low, slightly tired chuckle. “I’m not sure I like you learning _all_ of our bad habits so well.”

“Well, grad student, and technically more on the humanities side than the science side, so cataloging’s kind of my life,” Stiles says. He makes sure he saves the search summary, and then he pushes himself back and onto one elbow so he can get a better look at Peter’s profile. “You don’t have to give me the gory details now, I just…if it’s something to do with the room, or something I can ask Facilities about—”

“No. No, it’s not. It’s not—” Then Peter stops and takes a deep breath. When he starts again, he’s obviously making an effort to sound less curt. “It’s really nothing to do with you, Stiles. And I appreciate—believe me, I appreciate the offer to reduce the friction but it…”

Stiles raises his brows. “Has nothing to do with me?”

“Well, you were across the continent at the time, and I think we’d both completely forgotten your family even existed,” Peter says. He smiles as Stiles gives him the flick on the shoulder that deserves, smiles and flinches, and then smiles even wider as his flinch has…inconveniently pleasant repercussions further down their bodies. “Derek and I have been—we’ve been living with each other for a very long time, Stiles, and we’re used to each other in certain…seeing each other in certain roles, and I suppose it’s not quite so easy to suddenly see each other differently.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, um, sorry, but…are we still trying to date?” Stiles says, suddenly stiffening. “I’m just—because if that’s not happening, then last night must have been _really_ awkward and I’d like to know just so I’m not that guy who’s making—”

“No, no, nothing like that. We’re still very much dating, all three of us,” Peter reassures him. Then a more irritated, distant look comes into his eyes, just before he twists his head away to rub at it with his hand. “ _Trying_ being the operative word there.”

And then Peter goes quiet for a few seconds, leaning against his hand and staring off across the bed. For all that he _is_ the kind of guy who always has at least three glib retorts on hand, cross-ranked in order of how much they mess with your ego and personal space, respectively, he’s not without his introspective moments. Because he’s that kind of guy, Stiles sometimes thinks—he’s so unused to being the one at a loss, he tends to think really hard when that comes up.

“I’d question why it’s so much easier in the Dream Lands, except that’s not true either,” Peter finally says. “Otherwise we wouldn’t keep waking up—and no, Stiles, we aren’t leaving you out of the sex. It’s never gotten that far.”

“Just to be totally clear, I’m fine not actually being present, that’s not what I meant when I said that. I just want to make sure I’m up on what’s going on,” Stiles says. “I mean. Video would be nice. But, um, I’m not in this for the kinky stuff. Not only.”

Peter laughs and turns back. Ducks his head, then lifts it so that his mouth just grazes the underside of Stiles’ jaw as he comes up. “Oh, I know, and I _am_ , so let me assure you that there will be no leaving you out.”

“Okay, well, that too, but. Anyway. Just,” Stiles says, trying to sputter his way back to being a supportive partner. “You and Derek. Dream Lands stuff? So he’s less nervous about popping in there?”

“Not really,” Peter admits, sighing. “I think he only agreed to try it again because clearly, talking in the real world wasn’t working either and…in retrospect, I shouldn’t have asked but I’m out of ideas too. It’s just maddening that in a lot of ways, it was _much_ easier to talk to him back when we both were trying to avoid each other.”

His head drops again, and then he sighs a second time, more softly, as Stiles follows him so he can still press his brow against the side of Stiles’ face. “Because back then you weren’t thinking about wanting to have follow-up conversations?”

“Probably,” Peter says. The way his voice quirks, Stiles knows the man is wincing. “We can’t keep talking through you either. I realize that.”

“Well, yeah, probably not,” Stiles says as diplomatically as he can. “Besides, if it makes you feel better, I’m not that sure I’m talking that much more with him. I mean, I try, and I think he’s trying too, it just seems like…like a lot of stuff’s happened to your family that I don’t know about and I keep stepping in it, and I’m not trying to pry, I’m just saying…um, that I’ve noticed that.”

Peter’s head slides against his cheek, signaling another wince. “And _that_ is entirely not your problem,” Peter mutters.

“It might not be, but I can help, okay? Just so you know,” Stiles says. “And look, with my clearance level at Miskatonic’s library, you know I’m not going to be judge-y or grossed out.”

“I know,” Peter says. He moves his head back and looks at Stiles, and his expression is unusually serious. His mouth moves as if he’s going to say something and then it freezes in place. He tilts his head, eyes scanning Stiles’ face, and then his lips start to move again and…

His head swivels towards the window, and even before his shoulders start to stiffen, Stiles is pulling out of him. Scott and Derek and Allison are back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the Cthulhu Mythos, the Dream Lands are a dimension normal people can only access in their dreams, but you can travel physically to them under certain circumstances. They're populated by ghouls, Cthulhic monsters, mythical and legendary cities, and stuff like that. Also, cats can go there whenever they feel like it, because Lovecraft was an unabashed cat person.
> 
> In terms of timeline, this is set between chapter 7 of [Wolves in Ulthar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11049843/chapters/24634518) and its epilogue, because in retrospect it felt a little rushed to have Derek go from his self-realization that he's interested in Peter and Stiles to actually doing something about it. And Peter may put up a more charming front, but I think he'd have issues transitioning out of an antagonistic relationship that quickly, too.


	5. Chapter 5

Both Stiles’ and Allison’s afternoon meetings are rescheduled because of the injured ghoul. Nothing new pops up on the security alerts so Stiles finally caves and pings his father, who sends back a text that the Institute doesn’t exactly have main-campus staffing levels and it’s near one of the largest ghoul communities west of the Mississippi and they probably needed all those people to get on the research and lab tests to keep things from getting out of hand. “With a passive-aggressive Cthulhu emoji!” Stiles fumes. “Come on. I’ve literally asked him to divulge confidential job deets _once_ in the whole last week!”

“He’s having dinner with Dad and your mom this weekend, isn’t he?” Allison observes to Scott.

“This is not what I meant when I endorsed him getting a social life,” Stiles mutters, socking back with his laptop and his own research into the subject. “Whatever, fine. I’ll just figure it out first and hand it over to the clinic and then they’re going to have to spill.”

“Or we could visit the funeral home and talk to the assistant director, who’s Thurber’s sister?” Scott suggests.

Stiles blinks. “Who?”

“The ghoul? The one who’s in the clinic?” Scott says.

“And…who got you access to the clinic files?” Stiles says, abandoning his laptop to swerve around Derek and Peter and grab Scott’s arm. Which is oddly squishy, but hey, when there are compliance violations on the line, squishy is the least worrying outcome. “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, I just need to know who Dad’s sending Yellow Sign teams after, ‘cause that’s something like two reincarnations’ worth of trouble and that’s before you even get to HIPAA.”

“I didn’t get it out of the clinic, his sister told me,” Scott says, and then a tumor in his sleeve explodes.

Okay, actually, it’s just Quint, who apparently reacts badly to being squeezed, and who has learned to weave his tail-tentacles together into a parachute-type thing that allows him to get extra air when he leaps. Anyway. Five minutes later, once everything’s settled down and Derek has gotten over the (very, very slight, honestly) damage to his hair, Scott explains that he’s now Instagram buddies with the assistant director of the ghouls’ natural burial business, who he met during the dawn hike.

“I mentioned that Mom’s a coroner and is taking this course in forensic entomology and it turns out Caitlin’s uploaded some online courses to the same site. So we were talking and turns out she also does really cool tattoo designs on the side. Anyway, I told her I was doing more hiking later and I guess when she heard about her brother, she remembered and messaged me a warning,” Scott says, completely just trying to be helpful, while behind him Allison has the face of someone who _really_ regrets not being fully caffeinated for that meeting. “She says he’s starting to come out of the paralysis, but they still haven’t figured out what caused it in the first place. It just seems to be wearing off.”

“We were already heading back in. That app you signed me up for sent out an alert for everybody on Miskatonic property,” Derek says. He’s still fingering his hair, but Peter directs a pointed sigh his way and he grudgingly stops. “But that said wild animal attack.”

So they’re all in the living room of Stiles’ suite, with Scott and Allison standing with Stiles near the couch, while Peter and Derek are sitting on it. Peter’s starting to cull through Stiles’ search results, so while he’s obviously still eavesdropping, he’s looking at Stiles’ laptop, not them. Derek is supposed to be checking recent news reports on Peter’s tablet, but instead he’s giving Quint, who’s now peeking out of the back of Scott’s collar, a death-glare. Which is why he starts when Scott suddenly twists around to look at him.

“Caitlin says whatever her brother tangled with, it’s not anything local,” Scott says, eyeing Derek in a way that, if it had been anyone else, Stiles would have called suspicious. “Definitely not a wild animal, and she says if it’d been another ghoul or even a werewolf, his healing would be handling it better.”

“Well, so then why are you looking at me like you think I ripped him up?” Derek immediately snaps. Behind him, Peter’s head comes up. “Anyway, you were with me for almost an hour before that, and I ran into you only twenty minutes after I left here, Peter could tell you that, and they found him on the other side of town.”

Allison doesn’t seem to understand what’s bothering Scott either, but she steps up right next to him, taking his arm in a way that is decidedly signaling back-up. And Peter’s pretty much doing the same for Derek, turning and half-rising to loom up over Derek’s shoulder in one smooth motion.

“Hey, hey, okay,” Stiles says, staring at all of them. “Nobody’s throwing murder accusations around. I mean, nobody’s even been murdered, so far as we know. So let’s not jump to—”

“I wasn’t saying it was you. But it sounds a lot like a kanima, doesn’t it?” Scott says, still looking hard at Derek.

Derek’s face just—flattens out. It’s hard to describe, but somehow the emotion completely disappears from it without him moving a muscle, or without his color changes. It’s just like somebody shot him up with petrification fluid.

“And if it is, are you accusing us of being responsible?” Peter says. His tone’s all honey except for the slight drag in its undertone, like a knife being whetted. “Of somehow calling down a kanima on your new little ghoul friends, just because?”

Scott jerks. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, blinking, and then he shakes his head. “What? No, that’s not what I—I’m not saying it’s your fault, I’m just saying if it’s a kanima—”

“Well, go ask this Thurber guy if it is or not. He’d be able to tell you, it’s not like you need me for that,” Derek snarls, shoving himself up. He drops the tablet on the couch and stalks around the coffeetable into his bedroom. 

“Oh, that’s not—Derek, hey, I’m sorry, I was just—” Scott says. He twists around and takes a step after the other man, but Peter gets in the way.

Doesn’t do anything, just inserts himself between Scott’s lifted hand and Derek’s retreating back. He stares at Scott’s hand till Scott awkwardly drops it, then gives Scott a very thin, tight smile. Stiles starts to say something and Peter’s eyes flick to him; Peter’s expression loses a lot of the anger but doesn’t really get any less tight. “I’ll talk to him,” Peter says, before disappearing into the bedroom.

“That’s really not where I was going,” Scott says, looking stricken.

“Well, it’s where it ended up,” Stiles says sharply. He glances at the door, then takes a deep breath and tells himself that somebody around here has to be the calm person and it might as well be the guy who is missing half the story, _minimum_. If he wants the rest of it, he can’t just charge in yelling. “Look, just—what the hell was that just now? I mean, that—why are you picking a fight with Derek?”

“I wasn’t—I mean, I know that wasn’t…the best way to go about it, but…look. Can you…can you…” After some rapidfire head-swiveling between Stiles and the bedroom door, Scott settles on a hangdog expression and some half-hearted gesturing at the hall door. “Just for a second. I just…”

Allison clears her throat, and when Stiles looks at her, she taps her ear. Eavesdropping, okay, but it’d be by Derek and Peter and given what’s already happened, Stiles doesn’t exactly feel comfortable sneaking around behind their backs. “Look,” he starts. “Scott. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here, because framing people isn’t your usual M.O., but I’m—what am I even doubting, exactly?” 

“I know, and I’m not trying to do that. I’m not blaming Derek either.” Then Scott grimaces and gives the side of his head a hard enough rub that Stiles is surprised he doesn’t take off a layer of skin with it. “The kanima last time wasn’t his fault either. I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to say it’s his bad luck again or anything like that.”

“Well, you’ve known his guilt complex a lot longer than me, but I just feel like that could’ve been better-worded if that was what we were trying to avoid,” Stiles can’t help saying.

“Yeah, I know. I messed that up,” Scott says simply. “I’ll tell him that when he comes out.”

Which is right on point, and Stiles…he’s still mad on Derek’s behalf. But on the other hand, Scott knows exactly what he did wrong and he’s admitted it and hasn’t thrown in any excuses or defenses like most people would. And he could have—Stiles sometimes does, when he gets too frustrated with his and Derek’s weird interactions. And admittedly, some of Stiles’ anger here is him thinking this is going to send Derek into one of his antisocial spells right when Derek was actually doing pack cuddles _without emotional blackmail_ and that’s just really a selfish take on this and it’s just…not exactly his fight. Scott and Derek need to work it out, so he shouldn’t be working it out for Derek any more than he should be picking a fight for Derek. Otherwise he’s not really doing much better than Scott.

“So what’s a kanima?” Stiles finally asks, just to kill the awkward silence.

Scott and Allison look oddly at him.

“Okay, look, do you want me to go through the definition of what is and isn’t an eldritch horror _again_?” Stiles says, exasperated. Because seriously. There are a lot of supernatural things in the world, and individually fascinating as each of them probably are, he only has so many hours in the day and being hunted down by the Hounds of Tindalos is a pretty good deterrent to using time-travel to squeeze in more. “It’s some supernatural thing, and since it was _not_ part of my undergrad major, I’m going to assume it doesn’t affect your sanity—”

“Well, I guess that’s right, you have to already be messed up before you get one or turn into one,” Allison mutters. She starts to pull her phone out, then puts it back into her pocket. Then pulls it out again. “A kanima is a type of shapeshifter—it’s kind of a were gone wrong. They all start out with a bite from an actual were but then the turning goes wrong and…I think I still have one thing…”

“They’re on the rare side. When we ran across one, Peter actually had to look it up and tell the rest of us,” Scott says, taking up the conversation while Allison searches her phone. “The key really is that you need kind of a—a sense of self so when you go between human and were, you remember you’re still you, right? And a kanima doesn’t, they get lost in the shift.”

Stiles nods. “Okay, so this is a mentally ill werewolf.”

“Um, no, the shift is more like a really big lizard,” Scott says, looking pained, as he holds one hand up above his head. “Really big. And they have a tail like what’s it called, you know, elephant trunks are called the same—”

“Prehensile,” Stiles says.

Scott nods. Now that he thinks Stiles has caught on, he’s getting more energetic with the hand motions. “Yeah, that, and they have claws and fangs and when they bite you, their venom can paralyze even an alpha, and Allison actually had to stab my leg to kickstart my healing so I’d get over it, and oh! Right, depending on how long this one’s been around, they can have wings too. So I guess maybe they’re more like dragons.”

“Okay,” Stiles says slowly. “Dragon with paralytic venom. With mental illness.”

“The mental illness part is really more about why they become a kanima instead of a were in the first place. Once they are a kanima, they’re basically zombie soldiers for the first person who finds them, so that part’s more like mind control,” Allison says, looking up. She holds her phone out for Stiles to see the video clip on the screen. Then takes back the phone, wincing. “Crap, sorry, didn’t realize I had the sound all the way up.”

“No, that’s okay, I just…” Stiles rubs at the side of his face “… _how_ is this not an eldritch horror? Seriously, sometimes I wonder about the curriculum calls they make—anyway. So you think it’s a brainwashed dragon shifter running around being ordered to do evil stuff?”

“Well, the paralyzed part and the mauling would fit, but I haven’t seen any tracks or witness testimony, and haven’t seen this ghoul’s wounds either,” Allison says. She glances at Scott. “I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that’d fit better, but on the other hand, that’s not a lot to go on.”

Scott looks at the bedroom door again, his shoulders hunching up. He mutters something that Stiles doesn’t catch, except that it involves Derek, but Allison obviously gets more, because she twists sharply to look at the door too.

“Seriously?” she says. “And they didn’t even say—he almost _drowned_ last time because they didn’t tell the rest of us. What the hell—”

“Wait, what? What’s going on?” Stiles snaps. “Also, I know I wasn’t around for it, but actually, _because_ of that, can we not do the thing where we throw each other’s past history around like somebody’s keeping points? Because I’m definitely not.”

Allison looks back at him, eyes wide in surprise. She starts to say something, but she’s also beginning to look a little embarrassed, and so she doesn’t get it out before Scott breaks in. “This morning Peter smelled like he’d been way outside of town,” Scott says, chin up, eyes more than a little mournful. “A lot farther than I think he patrols just because of denning instinct, and last night he and Derek were—they act this certain way, when they think they’re threatened but they don’t want to tell you, and then I ran into Derek earlier today and he was tracking something. Well, he was trying—I think he’d lost it because he was trying to call—Peter? But his phone wasn’t getting good reception, so I offered to text you to tell Peter and he blew up at me. I know it’s not a lot to go on, that’s why I was trying not to say anything, but it’s just I kind of know how they act.”

“No, it’s not, but…but you think they’re acting weird, for them?” Stiles says. He can’t stop himself; this doesn’t really feel right to him, but on the other hand, he can’t ignore that little nagging voice that points out Scott _has_ known them longer than him. Then he thinks never mind, he’ll just ask Peter and Derek himself, and he takes a step towards the bedroom door. “Well, I don’t know—I still don’t hear anything about a kanima—”

“I know, but last night when Derek was outside, I heard him—he was coming out of the bathroom and then he suddenly ran into the parking lot. And I went back later to check it out,” Scott says, turning to follow Stiles. His voice rises some and gets slightly defensive, but he doesn’t try to stop Stiles. “Not because I didn’t trust him, I just figured I’m an alpha, if it was a territory thing, I could help, and there was this scratched-up patch and then I thought I smelled it—smelled a kanima, and it’s just such a weird smell—”

“Look, okay, I get you were worried about them but I still don’t think the best way to show it is to just give each other side-eye and—” Then Stiles stops.

“—but the sagebrush around here does kind of make everything smell a little stingy so I wasn’t sure, and yeah, I know, I didn’t want to make things awkward, and I also didn’t know if maybe you’d all talked afterward so that’s why I didn’t just mention it…” Scott goes silent. He and Allison shuffle around, that back-forth scuff when two people are trying to figure out who goes first, and then he clears his throat. “Stiles?”

“Scott,” Stiles says, very calmly. “Scott, how many heartbeats are there in here?”

“Four plus Quint,” Scott immediately says. “Um. Is that wrong?”

Allison steps up next to Stiles, then stifles a frustrated noise as she and Stiles both stare at the empty bedroom. “They went out,” she says. She looks around, then darts into the room and picks up a small black glossy square from the middle of the bed. “This is _Dad’s_. We use this when we’re confusing omegas about how many we’ve got in the pack.”

Scott makes a confused sound and comes into the room. He blinks once, lunges around the edge of the bed, and then spins around and hurries back so that he can peer out at the living room. “They _left_?”

“Yep,” Stiles says, because. Well. What else can he. 

“Stiles, I’m…” Once Scott’s gotten a look at Stiles’ expression, he changes his mind about what he’s going to say. He starts to reach out to Stiles, then pulls his hand back and looks around the room. Then he gratefully seizes upon something interesting near the windowsill and rushes over to throw up the sash. “Oh! Hey, I think they went this way! Oh, and all of the cars are still here, so I don’t think they could’ve gone too far…I’m sure they’re fine.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says.

Allison’s looking at him, with the kind of concerned look that you give someone when you’re not sure whether they might need a hug, or whether they’re a keg of dynamite. Which, Stiles thinks distantly, is not entirely off-base, given his fluency in cursing. That he’s not using right now. Even though he really wants to. Because honestly, he doesn’t know what’s going through Peter’s and Derek’s heads and doesn’t know why they might (blatantly, in retrospect) use Scott’s lapse of tact as an excuse to storm off into the bedroom, then sneak away for their own business without even leaving a note—

“Wait, did they?” Allison says, and then Stiles realizes he may have been working through those feelings aloud. “I mean, have you checked your phone?” 

“I’m not sure somebody who’s thought through leaving a replacement heartbeat behind is going to leave a note,” Stiles says. “I mean, what’s the point of setting up the alibi and then wiping it out?”

Scott looks back at him over one shoulder. Then the man takes his foot down from the sill—he’s gotten the window open and was halfway out it—and turns around and takes a couple steps towards Stiles. “Hey, well, we don’t know why they left, so I just think you should check. Maybe they said something.”

“Why would they _say_ something when clearly, that’s the last thing they want to do?” Stiles snaps. He thinks he sees Allison’s arm move and slaps his hand down over his pocket that’s holding his phone. Then he steps back so that he can lean against the wall and catch his breath and calm down, because honestly? Neither Allison nor Scott are the people he should be angry at. “I mean. Seriously. Let’s just look at the facts here, okay—clearly, Derek and Peter have been going after something since the night we got here, and _clearly_ , they don’t think I need to know about it. Instead they’d rather just secretly tag-team me, because that actually explains a lot about last night, way more than hey, maybe me and them are finally, actually starting to get on the same page and—”

“ _Stiles_ ,” Scott says sharply. His eyes don’t go red, but there’s just something…he makes all the attention go on him. And he doesn’t do that often, so when he does, it really means something.

The true-alpha thing, Stiles thinks bitterly, and with that he also thinks that no matter how many stupid papers he reads, he’s still never going to understand werewolves—and not-so-deep-down, he also has to wonder if maybe it’s not even them being werewolves. If it’s just the fact that he didn’t go to the same high school or sporting events or house parties, even though the Beacon Hills and Miskatonic casualty rates aren’t _that_ different (okay, excluding fatalities, because Miskatonic has state-of-the-dimension medical treatment facilities).

“Stiles,” Scott says again, more gently. But he sounds louder for some reason, and when Stiles looks up (Stiles realizes just then that he’s taken his phone out and absentmindedly started to scroll through his Aklo refresher app), Scott is right in his face. He starts and Scott grabs him, not hard but not letting him go anywhere, by the arms. “Stiles. Hey. Listen. I know you’re mad but we don’t know what happened. And if we don’t know, we—really, anything could be going on, so maybe let’s just take this a step at a time, and figure it out, and then figure out whether we need to be mad?”

He’s annoying, Stiles thinks, looking at his friend. Annoying, because Stiles is in the middle of some kind of unacceptably ridiculous run-around from Peter and Derek, and justifiably having feelings about it, and yet…it’s hard to say Scott isn’t also making sense. Which is annoying, but…right. He’s right. “I—yeah. Yeah, okay, I just—I don’t get it,” Stiles mutters. He glances down at his phone, then makes a face and switches over to his texting app. “Hmmm, well, nope, nothing. Let me check my voicemails…nothing there either. So guess it wasn’t important to let me know.”

Scott shifts back from Stiles, looking even more concerned. “Well, I still think we’re too early—” he starts, only to get cut off by somebody snapping their fingers.

It’s Allison, over by the window, leaning out and pointing at something. Then she pulls her head back in as Scott hurries over to her. “Footprints over to the edge of the parking lot,” she says. “Then that bush, I swear to God it was three feet to the left earlier today.”

“Okay, I’ll go look,” Scott says, climbing back onto the sill. He digs in his shirt for a second, then pulls out Quint and places him on a nearby dresser. Quint looks concerned but Scott just gives him an absent pat on the head as he braces himself in the open window. “You need to get anything from our room?”

“If it’s a kanima, I don’t even have those bolts with me, much less the bullets,” Allison says. Her tone’s more than a little curt, and when Scott glances back, she gives him a look that says she’s not completely opposed to Stiles’ take right now. “You really smelled it, and—”

“I think so, but I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to just worry people for no good reason if it wasn’t that, and I just…” Scott’s head hangs a little, but even so, they’re bending towards each other “…I’m sorry. I just was thinking, we’ve never been here and I don’t know this place well and I _do_ need to get better at just thinking I know enough when I don’t, and—and you were really into the trip too. I didn’t want to ruin it for you.”

Allison puts her hand up to the side of her face, pressing at it, and then strokes the hair back from it so Stiles gets half her expression. Which is frustrated and sad and fond all at once. Then she heaves out a breath and her back straightens. “Later,” she mutters. “Look, I do have a couple reinforced bolts, that’s about all that might do anything. I’ll grab them and then Stiles and I will meet you _outside_. Okay?”

“Yeah, got it, I’ll be there.” Scott smiles at her, reassuring and pleading at the same time. “Promise.”

“Sure,” she sighs, and then she steps back so that Scott can leap down to the parking lot. She watches for another second before closing the window. “How do you set whatever you need to?”

“Huh?” Stiles says.

“The window,” Allison says, looking up. She glances over Stiles, then lifts her hand like she might come over and hug him, or something like that. Then she stops and does that back-straightening, becoming-a-badass thing again. “Look, kanimas are—”

“What, dangerous?” Stiles says.

The smallest flicker of irritation goes over Allison’s face, and then it’s ruthlessly suppressed. “Yeah, and even an alpha might not be able to do much better than that ghoul, _and_ if Peter and Derek went after it alone, I’m pretty sure this means this isn’t just any kanima. They’re not like Scott, they don’t go after things just because—because it’s the right thing to do. They’re going after it because it’s a threat to them, or to you, and that probably means it’s being controlled by somebody they know. Which means it’s a revenge thing.”

And suddenly, all of the resentment seething in Stiles gets sucked out like somebody opened up a pit to Azathoth under it. He looks at her, then convulsively checks his phone—well, not like he’s going to get a note from them _now_ , and he’s just wasted more time doing that.

“Wolfsbane and mountain ash don’t work, neither does silver. It heals faster than a regular were but the flip side is it can’t hold onto its shift as well,” Allison rattles off, matter-of-fact except for the close way she’s watching him. “It’s being mind-controlled, remember, so the person in there doesn’t really understand what’s going on or what they are so sometimes you can use emotional triggers to make them drop out, and when they’re human, they don’t have were traits the way a true were would.”

“Okay,” Stiles says mechanically. Giant lizard zombie with paralytic venom that somebody’s trying to use to kill Derek and Peter because—because—stuff he wasn’t around for but—

“Last time we talked them out of shift, kind of, but that’s when we knew who it was inside the kanima,” Allison goes on. “I have no idea who it is this time, so I don’t know what would upset it or mean anything to it—”

—but damn it, he’s here right now and if he has to deal with a stupid lizard shifter with identity issues to get his boyfriends to open up, he’ll do it. He’s handled worse in his _freshman lab study groups_. “So it’s really susceptible to mental manipulation, okay, so Dad and I once had to screen the entire Psychology department to figure out which one accidentally let an ancient Valusian serpent-priest out of its enchanted headdress and got replaced by it à la _Invasion of the Body-Snatchers_ ,” Stiles sighs. “And Valusians usually test into genius range.” 

“I’m going to take that to mean you can force the kanima out of shift if we run across it,” Allison says. She gives Stiles another look, then nods sharply. “Okay, come on, I still want to get a bigger gun in case we run into the one controlling it, and then we’ll get Scott and find those idiots so you can ream them out. Sound good?”

“Well, I don’t know about _good_ , but yeah, let’s—”

“Good!” Allison says, hauling him out of the bedroom by one arm, an encouraging smile beaming from her face as sincerely as her grip is irresistible. She and Scott are ridiculously in love, but sometimes Stiles _really_ sees why they’re together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Caitlin' is named after Caitlín R. Kiernan, who's written a number of ghoul-focused Lovecraftian stories. 'Thurber' is from Lovecraft's _Pickman's Model_.
> 
> Lovecraft adopted Poe's obsession with premature burial in his Hazel Heald collaboration, _Horror in the Burying Ground_.
> 
> The Hounds of Tindalos were created by Frank Belknap Long. If you time-travel too much, you attract their attention and then they stalk you like the hellhounds of old Delta blues legend till you die horribly.
> 
> Most of this series, Stiles has gotten to be the expert explaining things to the n00bs, but the Cthulhu Mythos is so complex that it goes both ways--he's spent so much time learning about the cosmic horrors visiting the Earth that, unlike the Beacon Hills folks, he hasn't gotten very familiar with our homegrown terrors. And also this is an AU where he and Scott and Allison _don't_ have all those shared experiences, so they have to keep remembering to catch each other up.
> 
> Azathoth is a Cthulhu entity who lives/is trapped in a distant dimension and who usually can only be accessed by traveling through rifts in space-time.
> 
> Admittedly, I can't actually remember anyone expressly using wolfsbane, mountain ash, or silver on the kanima in the show, but Chris Argent was shown to be totally out of any hunter tricks when he went up against it. So I infer that if any of those could have worked, he would've been able to do something.


	6. Chapter 6

Scott is actually still in the parking lot when Stiles and Allison come out. For a second Allison looks surprised, and then she smiles at Scott like he’s just presented her with a giant bouquet of flowers and a tasting-menu dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town. “Hey,” he says, melting a little at the edges. Then he glances at Stiles and turns brisk, gesturing at the ground just beyond the edge of the lot. “So you can track their footprints and their scents over this way—I think maybe they were talking to somebody, because they stood in place right here. And that’s where the tracks end.”

Allison frowns. “They end?”

“I circled out but there aren’t any more,” Scott says. “This is as far as they went. I think there was some kind of argument, because it smells angry, but there aren’t any tracks leading anywhere else.”

“There isn’t a hole either,” Allison says, coming over and digging her toe into the dirt. Then, before Stiles can chime in with the obvious next suggestion, she looks up at the sky. “Would the alarms around this place go off if something came down from above? Because you said they let the nightgaunts fly around, right?”

And that is actually a step beyond the obvious, and Stiles can also see why Miskatonic is offering Allison a full ride to graduate school. “They might not if a kanima is the same size as one of those,” he says, thinking back through the security manual. “Nightgaunts wouldn’t trigger the wards at all, because they’re _allowed_ , they’re just supposed to be trained to stay by the designated roosts, but you can’t fry one just for not doing that. You’re supposed to call security to get it. Ghouls get really mad if you kill their pets.”

“Would just one be able to grab Derek _and_ Peter?” Scott says, looking at Allison. “I mean, we had a rough time before, but even so, Derek threw it through a couple walls.”

“But that one wasn’t mature yet, and maybe whoever they were talking to distracted them so it could paralyze them first,” Allison says. “Can you tell who that was?”

Scott sniffs deeply, thinks about it, then shakes his head. He gets down on one knee and pinches up some dirt, then lets it sprinkle away in the breeze as he takes a few more whiffs. “No, it’s weird…I smell kanima, and I smell Derek and Peter. The kanima must have shown up shifted, I don’t smell anything like they walked up as whoever they are normally…”

“Well, I don’t think they’d come outside if they just saw a kanima standing here.” Allison paces away, towards the bush that she’d mentioned had looked as if it’d been moved. She occasionally pauses to prod the ground with her foot. “Even Derek doesn’t throw himself into fights like that. And them leaving that fake heartbeat beeper, it’s like they just thought they could pop out for a second and talk and then come back before we noticed. If they tangled with it, shouldn’t we see more of a struggle?”

“I’m not picking up much either,” Stiles says, looking at the scan he’s just run. Granted, his phone isn’t optimized for non-Cthulhic evil, but even Scott’s showing up on it, so he should get _something_.

Actually, him not picking up anything is a big clue right there. He swaps out attachments and opens up a different app, then checks again.

“You said that bush looked like it was in the wrong place, didn’t you?” Scott calls over to Allison.

“Because it _was_ ,” she calls back. A series of sharp clicks makes Stiles look up just in time to see her use her loaded crossbow to give the bush a careful nudge. “It was there, and now it’s here. But the roots are still down. And the soil looks like it hasn’t been touched, like it’s been growing in this spot the whole time—”

“Oh, _shit_ , don’t move!” Stiles hisses, twisting around and running over. He grabs at Allison’s non-crossbow arm and pulls her back and…and for a second he stares at her arm in his hand, because he’d actually managed to grab her. Because she had, in fact, stopped moving, and now she and Scott, who was right on Stiles’ heels, are looking at Stiles for further instructions (no, Stiles really will never get over people actually listening to him, and if you’d been in his Miskatonic lab classes, you’d understand). “Okay. Okay. So the hike this morning, they went over the K’n-yan race, didn’t they?”

“Sadistic immortal shadow people who live underground and don’t have bodies anymore because they’ve degenerated too much?” Allison says. Then she looks at Scott.

“That’s basically what I got too,” he says, though he still looks a little sad that he can’t come up with at least one mitigating characteristic to mention. “Wait, you don’t think they’re involved—”

“What? No, are you kidding me? Miskatonic draws the lines at having _them_ as neighbors,” Stiles says. Then he leans over, jabs the probe attached to his phone into the ground by the base of the bush, and mutters a couple lines from the Pnakotic Manuscripts.

After a second, Allison looks away from the door-shaped hole that’s just appeared in the space between the spot where the bush is now and the spot where the bush used to be. “It’s—”

“Not a tunnel,” Stiles says. “Doorway. The K’n-yan did have an outpost here, but they shut it down a good century ago. Security would have made sure all the entrances were properly mapped, but you just don’t close down a localized time-space warp with that level of craftsmanship.”

Allison and Scott look at him, then at the doorway. Scott moves over slightly, putting one hand on Allison’s shoulder as he leans forward to peer into the inky darkness. He sniffs while she changes the ammo on her crossbow.

“It smells like it goes underground,” he says.

“Oh, well, it probably does,” Stiles says, as he tries to pull up that part of the campus map on his phone. “But it’s not a tunnel, where it goes underground isn’t going to be right _here_ , geographically speaking.”

“So where _does_ it go?” Allison asks. “Oklahoma? That’s where the K’n-yan are based, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but no, security would’ve thought about that too, can’t just assume that people know better than to poke around sealed doorways.” The map is available, but only in static PDF form that’s hard to zoom in on. And what Stiles can magnify is woefully short of details, to the point that he backtracks through the site to make sure he’s going in through the right login. But no, somehow his dad’s initiative to upgrade all campus mapping has passed the Institute by (which, if he wasn’t quietly stifling his panic over Derek and Peter, he’d be utterly righteous about because he came up with an _incredibly_ simple, intuitive color-coded threat matrix covering everything from Deep Ones to Ithaqua for that project). “It probably redirects to a storage room or something like that.”

“On campus? Is it somewhere that Miskatonic security would be able to check?” Scott says.

Something about his tone makes Stiles look up sharply. The other man’s stretched forward, his hand on Allison’s shoulder more for balance than anything else—she’s now got her hand on his arm and is clearly the one holding him back. She glances over at Stiles, then coughs and nudges Scott, who jerks back, blinks, and then tries to shake off the worried expression.

“They’re probably—” Scott starts.

“They’re _not_ fine, I can tell, and just—just level with me, would you? Somebody here do that, please?” Stiles says. He means it to come out no-nonsense so they can just get on with it, but for some reason his voice kind of cracks in the middle of it.

Scott moves like he might come over to Stiles and offer a hug, or something like that. Then he stops himself and just nods. “Right, well, they definitely weren’t dead. But it smells like a fight—more of one in there than out here, and I think the kanima drew blood. But I still don’t smell anyone who could’ve been controlling it.”

“They don’t have to be with it, they could be sending it out with orders, we know that,” Allison says, doing a much better job of being brisk and business-like. “My best guess, this doorway was set up to open and show something that got Derek and Peter down here, and then the kanima flew down and pushed them in so the door would close after them. That’s something that could be done, right?”

“Um, yeah, if you—” Stiles actually finds himself shying away from trying to put together the right chants in his head, just not wanting to—to think about how somebody might’ve made this mess happen “—yeah, you could set something like that up.”

“Does that mean where they’d end up could’ve been changed, too?” Allison asks. Halfway through, her attention drifts and she twists back, tugging hard on Scott’s arm as he tries to step towards the doorway. “Wait, I don’t think we should go in yet. We don’t know where it’s going to go, unless—Stiles, can you figure that out?”

“It just smells—sorry, it just smells familiar,” Scott mutters. “Like I’ve been there before…”

Stiles goes back to his phone for a second, then just gives up on the stupid map and starts scrolling through his contacts list to find the Institute’s head of security. “Well, yeah, you can reroute it, but doing it without Miskatonic noticing—I just don’t think—somebody who could do _that_ would be resurrecting shoggoths or bringing Yog-Sothoth through, wouldn’t need a kanima to snatch people—oh, you are _so_ fired. Are you kidding me?”

“What?” Allison says.

“Inbox is full! Inbox is full and not accepting new voicemails—when Dad hears he’s going to sic Yellow Sign auditors on this entire team, what the _hell_ ,” Stiles says, stabbing his finger at his phone. 

He ends the call and switches to email to send a strongly-worded—but what is he doing, if a call isn’t going to get through, email’s not going to be faster. So he starts to call his dad instead, except he swipes too quick and accidentally brings up the Dean of Academic Disputes’ number instead. The Dean isn’t going to care about Derek or Peter, they aren’t threatening to create new holes in the anti-Cthulhic wards just to invalidate a rival’s thesis, so Stiles skips back to his dad’s number, only to start thinking that if he can’t get hold of the local head of security, his dad might not be able to either. His dad is in Beacon Hills this week, and the Miskatonic office there is still getting ramped up so his dad doesn’t have all the tools he’d have back at Arkham and they really kind of need to find Derek and Peter _now_ and—

“Their compost!” Scott suddenly says, snapping his fingers. “The ghouls! _That’s_ where I smelled it before, it smells like the compost they had and oh! Caitlin said they had an off-site storage they rented from the Institute and her brother’s the one who goes out to turn it over!”

“Stiles,” Allison barks. When he looks over, she’s got her crossbow up and is aiming at a dark space plummeting right towards them.

Big membranous wings and clearly not a nightgaunt. Behind him, Scott roars. Allison’s crossbow snaps and a bolt flies straight up into the thing, but doesn’t so much as slow it. She curses, already halfway through reloading, and then almost puts out Stiles’ _eye_ as he grabs her from behind and throws her into a half-shifted Scott, sending them both toppling into through the doorway. Then he scrambles through himself, frantically flicking at his phone. He finds the right translated charm just in time to shut the doorway in the kanima’s face.

* * *

The first thing Allison does after rolling back onto her feet is to pop out one of those glowsticks, snap it to activate it, and stuff it into her jeans pocket so she’s got light for reloading her crossbow properly. The second thing she does is to scope out a circle around her, carefully aiming around Stiles. “Next time warn me, I don’t want to shoot you or break my string,” she hisses.

Stiles holds up his hands. “Okay, sorry, I’ll yell or something.”

She looks at him, then sighs and continues checking for something else to shoot. “All right, I’m guessing you made sure it can’t come after us, but whoever’s doing this probably knows we’re looking for Derek and Peter now, so we should get moving—”

Then she stops and she and he both stare at Scott. Because the first thing Scott did, apparently, was take his phone out and check for reception. Because he’s trying to make a call. When Allison cocks her head, he gives her a slightly missing-the-point smile of reassurance. “Hey, they really were telling the truth, the wifi’s _great_ ,” he says. Then his expression shifts as someone comes on the other end. “Um, Caitlin? Hi, it’s Scott.”

“You’re calling her?” Allison says in disbelief. And Stiles is a little distracted right now, but he does think she’s miffed too.

“Well, these are their tunnels,” Scott says, covering the end of his phone for a second. He does seem to pick up on the vibes coming from Allison, because he makes an apologetic face at her. And goes right back to his call. “That thing that attacked your brother, it’s called a kanima, it took some friends of ours, we think it’s using your tunnel to that composting off-site you mentioned—yeah. Yeah. Okay. Oh, that’d be great, but our friends got—yeah, we think—um, it’s…straight with a bend to the right at the end? Oh, and the other end goes left. Okay…right, right, left. Got it, thanks, see you.”

Scott ends the call and looks up, a determined expression on his face, and Stiles can _see_ Allison make the effort to just drop whatever is bothering her right now. Not that she hesitates to do that, it’s just obviously taking some work to do it. “That’s the way to the end of wherever we are?” she asks.

“Yeah, she says if we’re where she thinks we are, it’s probably half a mile and then we’ll hit it. And she’s coming up with a bunch of other ghouls from the other end,” Scott says. “Should be here in fifteen minutes, but since we don’t know how Peter and Derek are—”

“Well, the kanima’s outside, and in here I can tell the ghouls have this all warded up,” Stiles jumps in, scanning the wall with his phone. “Give me a sec, I can just…tap into them and do a couple tweaks…”

He’s vaguely aware of Scott and Allison doing some nonverbal communication around him, and then there’s another flare of light: Allison snapping a second glowstick that she gives to Scott, who then holds it over Stiles’ head to help him see his phone better. He mutters a thank-you and continues searching his codex for spells that’ll let him piggyback off the ghouls’ magical protections without also giving him a taste for dead bodies, while Allison takes point and Scott takes rearguard.

“I don’t hear anything or anyone yet, but Caitlin said that’s probably because the door to the compost chamber is shut. It’s really thick, apparently. We won’t be able to see it till we’re right at the last turn,” Scott whispers.

“So we’ll stop when we get there and then take a look,” Allison whispers back. “Any idea how we’re getting past the door? They probably changed the lock, right?”

“I should be able to get it open,” Stiles says, and then he stumbles over something.

Scott grabs him by the elbow and hauls him back up, then swings him to the right. The glowlight’s circle of visibility bobs briefly off of his screen and by the time his vision adjusts, he’s lost his place in his Saaamaaa Ritual references. He bites back a curse and scrolls with his finger, semi-ignoring how Scott is yanking him along, telling them to watch out, and then to the right again, and then—

There’s a _twang_ and Scott roaring, and the sudden rasp of a furry arm against him. And then Stiles gets shoved into the wall and the long hair flying in his face tells him that Allison’s the one doing that, so that mean that Scott is…Scott is thrashing around with something just beyond the arc of the glowstick, with showers of dirt flying up on top of that. Allison curses, her knee jammed on Stiles’ shoulder and rocking erratically—he guesses she’s trying to aim the crossbow and quickly mouths a cantrip that makes that glow.

“Too bright,” Allison hisses, and then she makes a muffled semi-squeaky noise as her foot collides with Stiles’ shin. “Sorry! Just can’t see—”

Stiles stifles a sigh and mutters an adjustment; Allison makes a happy noise and then her crossbow twangs. A second later, there’s a squishy kind of _thunk_ noise, plus a growly exclamation from Scott, who sounds as if he’s a few feet away from wherever the bolt landed. So Stiles figures at _that_ point, it should be cool to just hack into the ghouls’ tunnel wards and make the whole place light up, since they’ve obviously lost the element of surprise and might as well see what they’re facing.

“—oh _shit_!” Scott half-yelps, half-warns, barreling up to them as the squiggly yellow lines blaze into view all over the tunnel. 

He’s still shifted, all red eyes and pointy ears and spiky tufts of fur sticking out of his clothes, and even though Stiles has seen it before, Scott is coming right _at_ them. Instinct makes Stiles duck and roll to the side; on the other hand, Allison immediately moves forward and he gets a blur of something near her arm. Stiles snaps his head back up and catches Allison reloading the crossbow just as one, Scott lands next to them, and two, a scaly, hissing thing with an impressive set of fangs rises up from the ground where Scott had just been.

“It got in again?” Stiles says.

“I guess—” Scott gasps a little, twisting sharply around in front of Stiles, and he’s clutching at one limply hanging arm “—wait, don’t _shoot_ it—”

“It’ll heal, I’m just trying to get it knocked back enough for us to—” Allison snaps, the end of her crossbow dipping as she tries to aim for the kanima’s open mouth.

“—hole! There’s a hole! It’s between us and the hole!” Scott shouts. Then, as Allison falters and the kanima feints towards him, he jerks up onto his feet and snarls at it. “I don’t know if that’s the way out! Maybe it got back in that way!”

What Stiles should do is keep hacking into the wards till he find something that stops the kanima in its tracks, but instead he squints past Scott and Allison’s legs for this hole. And…there is one. A giant one, its rim stretching nearly all the way across the tunnel. Then it—flickers—and for a second, as Scott and the kanima slide back and forth between it and Stiles, taking swings at each other, the hole disappears. Then it’s back, and with it come other things that weren’t there before: the felt-thick smell of compost, the shouts of other people from somewhere down in the hole.

“The tail! The—goddamn it, Scott, watch the tail!” Derek yells.

“Derek?” Scott says, pausing mid-roll.

Said tail comes whipping at Scott’s head and several things happen at once: Allison shoots it, a clawed hand comes up over the edge of the hole and slashes at the kanima’s leg to throw it off-balance, and Stiles gives up on his phone and grabs up a rock from the ground to stab some emergency geometric diagrams into the wall to alter the angles in Scott’s favor. So that kanima tail never comes anywhere near Scott’s head, and Scott finishes his roll to safety, then pops up with a thankful-embarrassed look on his face.

Also, that wasn’t actually a rock Stiles picked up. Well—it’s a rock, but also, it’s a rock with runes carved on it, which aren’t interacting well with the spellwork the ghouls previously laid into the tunnel walls. The moment it touched the wall, it started to heat up so Stiles jerked his hand away, but the stone is still sticking where he left it. Sticking and spitting out reddish sparks, the runes flaring up and then dissolving as he tries to make out what they were. Then a particularly big spray of sparks makes him back up, throwing up an arm to protect his face, and something in the corner of his eye catches his attention.

There’s a whole line of similar stones with runes carved into them, half-embedded in the ground, except for one spot where there’s a gap. The shoe-prints on either side tell him the rest of the story: he must have kicked it loose, and then they could see the hole. And the kanima—

“No, I can’t get out, do you think I’d be just watching if I could get out?” Derek is yelling. “Stop dicking around!”

“We’re not!” Allison yells back, tracking the kanima with her crossbow as it digs in at the edge of the hole, clawing at the ground so that nobody on either side can get near. “But just how do you think we’re supposed to—”

“Stiles!” Scott shouts. He’s trying to tag-team the kanima with Allison, but then he gets distracted by something he can see in the hole. “Stiles! Peter’s here too and there’s a—the hole, I think the bottom’s falling out—”

“It’s a K’y-nan gate,” Peter calls out, voice hoarse as he strains against something. “Stiles, they weakened the seal—”

Runes, ghoul magic, two completely unrelated magical systems interacting with each other and Stiles doesn’t know how and he needs to figure it out before Derek and Peter end up transported to an underground land populated by immortal insane sadists. Right. He can do this. He gets down on his hands and knees, feverishly scanning the runestones as lines of ghoul-magic burn and flex all around him, and now someone else besides Scott is roaring, a hideous rising shriek that tears at Stiles’ eardrums so he almost forgets and drops his phone to cover his ears. He hunches his shoulders against it, page upon page of disconnected references tumbling through his head as he just—tries to figure out—what they were _doing_ —

“ _Derek look out!_ Allison screams.

Stiles can’t help it. He looks up, and at first he can’t see anything but blackness. Because the gate’s just finished opening and he’s too late, he thinks, his stomach fighting with his heart to leap out of his mouth first, and _then_ …the kanima sweeps its wing out of the way. It’s clinging upside-down to the top of the tunnel, screeching angrily at Derek, who’s gotten all the way back up to the rim and whose head is just visible, snarling back at the kanima. Scott’s running around somewhere, Stiles can hear him and Peter yelling at each other, but all he sees is that kanima tensing as if it’s going to drop right down onto Derek’s face, fangs-first, and Stiles just. Not. No. Never mind about figuring out what they did, Stiles just is _not_ sitting here and seeing this.

About a minute later, Scott’s panting face appears above Stiles’. He looks worried, and reaches down to touch Stiles’ cheek; Stiles blinks and Scott…doesn’t look less worried. “Are you okay?” he asks. “You’re really…wow, you’re cold, and you’re really pale, and—”

He gets shouldered aside by a dirt-encrusted Peter, who hauls Stiles up by the shoulders, growling at Scott when the other man frowns at him. “Let’s have this conversation away from that damned hole, shall we?” he snaps. “Because I, for one, am not interested in repeating the last few hours of my life.”

Derek pushes in next to Peter, grabbing up Stiles’ left leg while he keeps looking over his shoulder. “Yeah, it’s still—I think it’s still caving in, it’s getting bigger.”

They’re outside, Stiles suddenly realizes. Those are stars overhead—and when did it get _that_ dark? Did they…they missed dinner. It’s night-time. It’s night and they’re outside, above-ground, and when he cranes his head, he can see over Peter’s shoulder and there’s a huge circular pit and—Stiles flails. Punches somebody in the nose, has his limbs dropped, and manages through sheer panic to land mostly on his feet. “Where’s the kanima?” he shouts, staring up at the sky, then at the hole. “Where is it, I don’t see it, where—”

“I think you sent it somewhere,” Derek says, sounding kind of muffled. When Stiles looks over, Derek is pinching the bridge of his nose. Which…shifts slightly, and then Derek lets go of it, but keeps his hand up to cup over it. He grimaces and blows out an experimental snort, and when his nose doesn’t fall off, he blows harder and then wipes the blood off with his fingers. With his other hand, he starts doing something with his phone. “It changed colors and then disappeared, and—hang on, I think I got it at the end of the video…”

“You were filming all of that?” Allison says. She’s just as dirt-packed as Derek and Peter are, Stiles suddenly realizes. She’s banging her unloaded crossbow against her knee to get out the dirt. Then, when that doesn’t seem to work, she brings it up and starts to dig out the clods with her fingers; a patter of little soil bits falls out of her hair onto the crossbow and for a moment Allison looks like she just wants to toss the crossbow. “You had _time_ to?”

“What, no, look, it’s not—did that look like fun? Do you think I have fun when a kanima drops me and Peter into a big compost pit?” Derek snarls. “I was trying to find one of Stiles’ curses that’d make it go away! I just hit ‘record’ instead!”

Peter still is holding onto Stiles’ shoulders, and looks like the last thing he wants to do is referee this argument, but…he can’t help but heave out a disgusted sigh at the other two. “Honestly, is _now_ the right time to rehash this?”

“I don’t think the kanima’s around anymore, at least,” Scott says. He turns slowly in a circle, sniffing, and then abruptly stops. “Oh, but—um, the ghouls are here. I think I see—yeah, hey, Caitlin! Over here!”

“Caitlin?” Derek says, giving _Allison_ a curious, oddly sympathetic look.

Allison crosses her arms over her chest and nonverbally dunks Derek’s sympathy into the nearest shoggoth pit. “I think we should figure out how you got into that place to begin with,” she says, looking at Derek and Peter. “And why you were outside so somebody could trick you into that. And _who_ , since it looks like you already knew there was a kanima around. And—”

“No,” Stiles says. He is…still a little dizzy, so shaking off Peter would be a bad move for his ability to keep his head off the ground, but he manages to tilt himself mostly vertical. His hand is hurting, and then he looks down and realizes if he keeps clutching his phone like that, he’s going to break it. And he still needs that too—at least till he gets back to his laptop and. Yeah. He needs that too. “No, nope, no, Peter’s right.”

Allison breathes in sharply, definitely going to argue that point, and Peter pivots to face up to her.

“We are going right back and we’re gonna figure it out there, but we’re going back. Not doing it out here,” Stiles says. “No. Absolutely not. We’re going back to my room first, and we are going to _stay there_ till I get this, okay?”

Everybody’s staring at him. Well, he is the only one currently talking—even Scott’s left off from waving at the ghouls loping towards them—but it’s still kind of weird. The way they’re looking at him, it’s not like they’re looking at him to agree or disagree or anything like that. It’s more like…Allison raises one hand towards him, then takes it back when Peter flicks her a look. But then Peter moves one hand like he’s going to—to feel Stiles’ forehead and take his temperature, or something completely irrelevant like that. He ends up changing his mind about it, but still looks like he wants to stick his head in the crook of Stiles’ neck and only isn’t because…whatever he thinks Stiles is about to do. Which really is just insist they _get back in their room already_.

“Okay, I’ll—um, let me just explain really quick to Caitlin,” Scott says. He takes a step away, then hastily undoes the movement, his eyes widening. “I mean, um…right…” he takes out his phone “…just a second, I just…we kind of should explain the hole in their tunnel.”

“Well, okay,” Stiles says, watching Scott look up a number and then watching one of the ghouls pull back up onto two legs and take out a phone. “Sure. I guess they’d want to know.”

“Yeah, I’ll just tell her and then we can go,” Scott says, still looking nervous. “Just a minute, I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The K'y-nan featured in the Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop collaboration, _The Mound_. It was set in Oklahoma, but part of it tied back to the Spanish colonization of America, so I think extending the K'y-nan's influence further into the Southwest is fitting. I'm sort of thinking the Institute is somewhere in New Mexico.
> 
> I've mentioned this in previous endnotes in this series, but in Lovecraft's world, math is: 1) likely to drive you psychopathically insane, so evil beings can possess you, and 2) capable of warping space-time without needing a hyperspace engine or anything like that.
> 
> Stiles shares my pet peeve with people who don't regularly empty their voicemail inbox. I mean, _why_. Especially if you're in a position where people could be calling you up at any time with emergencies involving the possible sucking of this world into the gigantic maw of a tentacle-headed alien. Oh, and the Yellow Sign auditors are a reference to Chambers' _King in Yellow_ mini-mythos, which does hook back to the Cthulhu Mythos.


	7. Chapter 7

It actually takes Scott more like five minutes to get the ghouls to let them go, but even so, Stiles is impressed with his friend’s ability to steamroll with sincerity, and all the more so since Scott’s really the only one trying to charm the ghouls. Allison is right up there by him, but she quickly gets side-tracked with taking notes on what the ghouls are saying about the structural damage they’re finding so far, while Stiles is. Stiles is.

He’s still mad. Okay, he’s not a complete antisocial idiot, he does go over there and introduce himself and cite his father and make sure everybody understands that Miskatonic security is going to be looking into this, so that they’ll _all_ be safe from the winged lizard who needs identity counseling. Thankfully, the ghouls don’t question any of that, and just offer to coordinate the zillions and zillions of meetings and conference calls that are now going to happen. But he’s still mad.

Derek and Peter don’t get involved at all. They just stand back and watch everything—Peter occasionally mutters something to Derek, but then, when Stiles looks at him, he just asks things like whether Stiles knows he’s got Scott’s blood on his shirt or if Stiles is too tired to walk back to the visiting scholar suites, since obviously nobody wants to go back into the tunnels. But also _obviously_ , they don’t have to walk if the perimeter spells are so messed-up that a kanima could get through them, and Stiles already needs to call his dad about that so he might as well throw in some more geometrical warping of space-time and make them a shortcut.

“They said they’re having all of their tunnels rechecked, but that’s going to take a few days, at least, and they didn’t even know there was a K’y-nan gate under that compost room,” Scott says as they pop back out into the parking lot. “Um, but working theory, they’re looking into who they were composting in that room. Something about magic left in the corpse and it rotting the protective wards?”

“Who they were composting?” Allison asks, a half-disgusted, half-weary look on her face. “You mean evil wizards? Are there that many of them?”

Scott gives his hair an absent scruff, then sighs at how much dirt shakes out of it. “No, not really, but they do a lot of burials for familiars.”

“Familiars?” Allison says, and behind her, Peter looks interested. But then he catches Stiles’ eye, grimaces, and quickly rearranges his expression into one of bland boredom. “Like witch familiars?”

“More or less, yeah. I never realized, but apparently grave-robbing is still a big deal and there’s this whole black market for using familiar body parts in potions and stuff like that, and if you’ve had a familiar for decades and cared for each other, that’s definitely going to be upsetting,” Scott says, warming to the subject. Sometimes Stiles thinks his friend’s greatest power is how he manages to sound so un-creepily enthusiastic about stuff like that, as if he was just discussing the latest eco-friendly trend. “So the ghouls take the bodies and make sure they really break down, so nobody can do that to them. They think maybe that’s what first attracted the kanima too—like it was really hungry, and broke in to eat?”

Allison frowns. “I don’t remember kanimas wanting to eat like that…it should still shift back into whoever it is.”

“Not if it’s far enough along to develop wings,” Peter finally breaks in. When she turns back to look at him, he gives her a tolerant smile. “I do think I mentioned that last time, as why we needed to hurry to deal with it. If the kanima’s development is left unchecked, it eventually loses all sense of its human self and is only left—”

“We’re not inside yet,” Stiles snaps.

Peter flinches, then shuts up, much to Stiles’ surprise. Even once they’ve gotten inside the building and Allison’s asking whether they should do anything since they’re still not sure where Stiles sent it, he doesn’t pick up talking about the kanima. And he doesn’t join in when Stiles tells Allison to go grab her and Scott’s things from their suite and to bring it across the hall, so they just have to do the extra protective spells once. Or when Stiles stops Scott from going with Allison to help and instead makes him sit down on the couch so Stiles can scrape under his claws for kanima samples.

Derek isn’t talking either, but unlike his usual, he doesn’t seem comfortable about it. He keeps alternating between looking at Peter, who finally mutters that he’s going to take a shower as no one else has called it, and Stiles. And then, after Stiles has his samples and Scott’s promise to stay put, he follows Stiles into the bedroom and fidgets while Stiles loads the samples into some test tubes.

“Look, we should figure out where it went,” Derek finally says. “Otherwise it could come back and—”

“I _know_ that, does it look like I’m just sitting around waiting for it instead of pulling out hieratic circles from Nitocris’ tomb decorations?” Stiles says.

Derek tilts his head and some of his old impatience colors his expression. But then he takes a deep breath, and squats down next to Stiles on the floor. “Do you…have any ideas?” he says, sounding like he might be hurting something, trying not to growl. “Where it is?”

Honestly, no. But instead of saying that, Stiles says: “If I tell you, are you going to tell me when you’re going after it this time?”

Which is pretty childish, even Stiles can see that, pissed-off as he is. They’ve got better things to do right now than to have one of _those_ fights, and he just…needs to take a deep breath and remember that. And maybe remember what the hell he did back there in the tunnel. And work on finding the kanima before it causes more trouble, and thinking about how annoying Derek staring at him isn’t going to help with that, even if it _is_ annoying and Derek really has no reason to be the one staring, considering Stiles isn’t the one who’s fond of sneaking out the bedroom window and—

“It was a stupid move, I know, but we weren’t planning on fighting it right then and there,” Derek says. Then watches, eyes widening slightly, as Stiles startles and grabs at the carpet for balance. His brows furrow towards each other. “You…know you were saying all of that out loud, right?”

“Well, _no_ ,” Stiles snaps. Lets go of the carpet, and gives the side of his head a rub as cover for thumping some sense back into himself.

Derek starts to suck his breath like he’s going to grunt in irritation, and then lets it out in a tired sigh. He glances up at Stiles, then shifts so that he’s actually sitting in front of Stiles, not just crouching back on his heels like any second he’s going to leapfrog over Stiles and bash his way through a wall. “Okay. This is what happened. Back at the restaurant last night, I saw—”

“The kanima?” Stiles says.

“No. Well, yeah, but it wasn’t the kanima back there, it was the person who turns into them. They’re not like other weres, they’re pretty much like two different people in the same—did Scott get through all of that part with you?” Derek says, starting off awkward and on the verge of ashamed before suddenly veering back into awkward because he is not the designated explainer in their group and he knows they all know it. He looks deeply relieved when Stiles nods. “Anyway. It didn’t look right, because we killed them something like seven or eight years ago.”

“And dead things never come back, and also, that’s just the kind of random thing you notice and then come back inside so you don’t miss dessert,” Stiles says.

“No, I did that because we didn’t want to—I’m just trying to tell you what happened, all right? I’m not saying it was right—I just said it was stupid. I’m not trying to make excuses,” Derek says, lips twisting in a grimace as he ducks his head, runs one hand repeatedly through his hair. “I just—Peter and I talked it over and we were keeping an eye out and then we saw them again right next to the parking lot, except they weren’t moving at all, and we were starting to think it was some—sick practical joke. Like a hologram or something. So we went down just to see and we were going to come right back up.”

Stiles opens and closes his mouth a few times. Fiddles with his phone. And finally, he just goes for the obvious, because the obvious is about all he can process out of that without his mind getting stuck in an illogic feedback loop and crashing horribly. “What, so you popped out for a second so that’s why you figured nobody would notice if you just stuck a fake heartbeat thing on the bed?”

“Well, the only other werewolf here is Scott, and anyway, that was Peter’s idea, not mine,” Derek says. He’s even starting to sound faintly offended, as if it’s more of an issue for him that Stiles would get it wrong which of him and his uncle is the alibi expert around here. “So that’s what happened. We went down and—”

“Not a hologram?” Stiles asks.

“What? No, it was a hologram,” Derek says irritably. He’s scruffing his head again, looking off at the bathroom door. “Or something really similar. It’s just the kanima was also really there, and the moment we got down, it bit us and we were paralyzed while it dragged us through this weird wormhole that suddenly appeared, and then we were in that compost hole.”

The reason Stiles can’t process this, he starts to work out, is that actually it all is completely plausible. Derek can lie, when he really wants to, but he’s clearly not right now, and even more clearly, doesn’t see why he should even need to. He literally is just saying what happened to him and Peter, and it’s probably mostly accurate, at least when interpreted through Derek’s POV, and at the same time it is completely batshit insane. Stiles knows that those two realities are co-existing, because the coexistence is right in front of him, and yet it is not _possible_.

Derek’s giving him that scrunchy-puzzled look again, like the man thinks the weight of his brows can press Stiles into something he understands. “I’m talking out loud again, aren’t I?” Stiles says.

“Yeah,” Derek says, the uncertainty in his voice clearly not directed towards the exhibitionist tendencies of Stiles’ inner monologue. He absently digs around in his pockets, then takes out his phone because it’s buzzing. Gives it a glance, starts to mutter something about Cora needing to get someone else’s car to borrow, and then he stiffens. Unlocks it and pokes at it, and then holds it so that Stiles can see a video playing on it. “Okay, look, Peter couldn’t figure out how to get past the magic keeping us in that hole so I was going through some clips I had of you chanting, and I accidentally hit ‘record’ when you guys ran in. I think I caught the tail-end of whatever you were doing, would this help you figure out where the kanima is now?”

* * *

So fast-forward to Peter _and_ Derek staring at Stiles as if, of all the things that have happened in the last twenty-four hours, him yelling at them is the weirdest. “Because it’s just like—I can’t even verbalize at this point, okay?” Stiles says, all the energy rushing out of him. He sits down on the edge of the bed and his limbs feel like somebody cut all their tendons. “It’s just—why are you acting like this is no big deal?”

“I…I don’t think we are,” Peter says after a long, uncomfortable silence. He isn’t looking at Derek, or at the sudden half-angry, half-worried look the other man’s giving him, but he’s also not quite looking at Stiles either. His gaze is more landing on Stiles’ throat than eyes, and not in a lascivious traditional werewolf kink kind of way, either. “This _is_ a big deal, clearly, and we’ve completely botched it. I’m not too proud to admit that, and I’m sor—”

“Oh, I don’t mean this thing where we’re dating but _Scott_ can read your sneaky pack maneuvers better than me,” Stiles says, tilting himself backwards onto the bed. He stares at the ceiling for a second. “I mean, yeah, I’m mad about that too, but I just—I can’t—this thing. This thing where you—you had a _kanima_ stalking you, and on top of that, it’s the lich version of a kanima, and—”

Peter makes a startled noise. “What? Who said that?”

“I told him we thought we’d killed him,” Derek says.

“Well, yes, the _person_ , but for kanimas, that’s a common trigger for evolving to the next stage. Or did you not listen to _anything_ I told you after ‘stab them with their own claws,’” Peter says, his usual sarcasm enriching his voice. “That’s not a lich. That’s, I _also_ told everyone we shouldn’t use Chris Argent’s recommendation for out-of-state body disposal. But no, I was outvoted.”

“ _That_ thing,” Stiles says, and he can sense the other two turning to stare at him and his rabid conductor gesturing, and whatever, he thinks the least he’s allowed right now is some physical comedy. Because the other kinds of comedy going on right now actually aren’t very funny, at least by human standards. If he thinks too long about them, he starts to see why Nyarlathotep is considered the jokester of the Great Old Ones pantheon, and that’s a bad sign for his ability to continue to pass Miskatonic’s psych screenings. “That one. That thing where this really hard to kill monster shows up from your past, _not_ dead like you thought and gunning for you, and you’re just…oh. Not dead. Okay, let’s go kill it in our spare time. No big deal, I mean, aside from not telling the boyfriend who wasn’t there for the first round of fighting, but otherwise this is _just_ like, like, I don’t know, like spotting your ex from that one bad break-up and pretending you didn’t so you don’t have to tell me about the break-up. I mean, from your POV.”

And what Stiles gets in response is silence. Silence that goes on and on, until he’s honestly thinking about sitting up just to check whether they’re even still in the room, because _yeah_ , apparently, this is a thing he’s got to check now.

“We’re not leaving for the rest of the night,” Peter says firmly, clueing him into the fact that once again, his inner monologue is being a total showoff. “Stiles. I give you my word, we’re not going to do that again. We shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

“And it kind of is the ex situation,” Derek adds, sounding odd enough that Stiles pushes up on his elbows and looks at him. Derek’s actually edged halfway over to the bed, with an uncharacteristically earnest look on his face. More like him is the wary guilt in his eyes, and how he tenses up when Stiles moves, as if expecting to have to retreat. “Look, if it’s really the one we think it is—well, it’s one of the people Kate Argent bit around the same time as Scott, when she was trying to build up her own pack.”

“She was selecting for personalities who’d be too weak to resist her will. McCall was a surprise in that department, but two of her three other picks ended up kanimas instead.” Peter’s also sidling over to the bed, in a slightly more confident manner, but once he gets to the edge, he just stands there. He clearly wants to get on, one of his hands repeatedly going out to almost touch the sheets, but he’s holding back for some reason. “We did manage to intervene with one and help him convert to a regular werewolf, but the other one was too far along, and all we could do was put him out of his misery. Which, it appears, failed.”

“I actually wasn’t trying to drag up old psycho serial killer ex history,” Stiles mutters. Because of course he can’t even yell at them without sticking his foot through the rotting floor of past Hale tragedy. “Just—this is what I mean, okay, I never seem to know what the hell is going on, I just know there’s all this—this _stuff_ that happened to you and that is _not_ what I’m mad about. What I’m mad about is why do you think this is not a big deal? Someone is trying to _kill_ you, okay? That? Big deal.”

When he takes his hand off his face, Peter and Derek are looking at each other across him. Derek moves one hand and Peter gives him an impatient shrug, then rakes one hand back through his hair abruptly enough that Derek startles at the movement. For another second, Derek eyes Peter, but Peter clearly isn’t going to say something, and Derek…apparently draws the line at this kind of awkward silence.

“Well, it happens a lot,” Derek says. He motions aimlessly with his hand. “I mean, this comes up with you and your research too.”

“No, it doesn’t!” Stiles says, jerking up. “That’s why we have research review boards and an entire security department and over three hundred years of megalomaniac psych profiles to screen against! Because we know this is freaky dangerous cosmic horror stuff and it freaks us out and we try to minimize the freaking-out! And don’t say ‘because we’re werewolves’ either because this isn’t a culturally-constructed dispute resolution mechanism! This is somebody tried to kill you just because!”

“Stiles,” Peter finally says. He pauses, glances at Derek, and then takes a deep breath as he bends down so that he and Stiles are almost at eye-level. “Stiles. You’re upset. How do we make that stop?”

 _Stop getting almost-killed in front of me_ , Stiles almost says, but he doesn’t. Because, clearer than Cthulhu emerging from sunken R’yleh, Peter and Derek just don’t _get_ where he’s coming from. And they’re not going to get it. And he’s not going to make them get it, or get how to make this all stop, if he just keeps yelling at them. He’s going to have to try something else.

Of course, that means he’s got to think up what that is, and right now he’s kind of fresh out of relationship insights. If he ever had any in the first place.

“Stay put,” he finally says. “Just—just stay.”

Peter purses his lips, then parts them as if he’s going to say something, and then he…doesn’t. Instead he just nods and gets on the bed next to Stiles. He looks at Stiles again, as if checking for something, and then twists around and bends over—oh, he’s getting all the important stuff Stiles left on the floor, like the laptop and test tubes and Derek’s phone. He hands them to Stiles and then settles himself.

“Should I take a shower?” Derek asks. He focuses on Peter staring at him first, hunching his shoulders. “Well, look, I’m still—”

“Take a shower,” Peter mutters, his eyes closing in a way that signals otherwise he’d be rolling them. Then he goes still and slides a glance at Stiles, as if he thinks Stiles is going to object or something like that. “The window’s too small in there, it’s not as if you could get through it. Not without taking the entire wall with you, and even the Argents haven’t figured out how to cover that up. We’d notice.”

It’s the kind of thing that Peter says all the time to needle at Derek, except this time Peter sounds almost like he’s trying to reassure Derek, in a weird, still condescending, but _I’m trying, nephew, you should respect that_ way. And Derek actually seems to take it like Peter means it, his shoulders relaxing in relief. “Yeah, true,” he says.

He stands there for another second, then goes into the bathroom. Stiles had opened his laptop while watching the two of them, and when he looks down, he finds that his hands have automatically launched his browser, which is set to go to the login page for Miskatonic’s library. He looks up and Peter’s looking back at him, but not saying anything, and not looking like he’s going to say anything. So Stiles still has no idea what to do with either of them, so he…logs into the library. And starts researching other stuff. Because _that’s_ going to solve all of their problems, obviously.

On the other hand, he’s got nothing better. Stiles sighs and keeps on typing, and honestly wonders whether he should just give up on the research trips from now on.

* * *

An hour later, Derek’s out of the shower and huddled up (as much as a guy as stacked as he is can huddle) by the headboard, faking a nap except for whenever Stiles shifts a limb. Then his eyes slit open and he checks Stiles and then Peter, in that order. It’s actually eerily like how Stiles pictures Derek would be like as a cat in the Dream Lands (since Derek’s never consented to dream-share with him and he’s not a mentally invasive psychopath bent on making Derek’s consent issues worse just for the memes).

Peter’s pretending to nap too, though he’s closer to Stiles. But he’s not actually touching Stiles when normally he’d take every opportunity to nuzzle a hip or pillow his head on Stiles’ lap or just flat-out drag Stiles onto his lap so he can have his cuddles _and_ free peeking at Miskatonic’s online archives. Also, it’s been an _hour_ and he hasn’t asked a single question about what Stiles is looking up, or whether Stiles has theories yet. Stiles has asked a couple questions about the kanima and Peter has answered them, but that’s all he did, answer them. No shoehorning in self-flattering anecdotes, no trying to pry for bonus occult knowledge.

Honestly, it’s getting creepier and creepier, and then Scott pops in, holding a bag of food. “Hey, I don’t know if any of you are hungry, but—”

“Did you go _out_?” Stiles blurts out.

Scott pauses, his expression slowly going from cheerful to concerned. His gaze moves past Stiles for a second, then comes back as he gingerly eases into the room. “No, just downstairs. Allison and I figured everything else would be closed, it’s so late, but they have really good vending machines—sandwiches, even. So we got some.”

“Oh. Okay.” Actually, Stiles knew that. It’s the modern era and the university can’t really get away with letting its scholars live on coffee and breadcrumbs, especially since at least five breaches in the barriers holding back Azathoth in the last fifty years can be attributed to hunger delirium, so it does pay off to invest in twenty-four-seven snack availability. “It’s just—”

“No, it’s okay, I think we’re done going out tonight. Well, the ghouls do want to talk, but I asked if they could just come by in the morning,” Scott goes on. He starts digging in the bag, and then comes up with a slightly-smushed club sandwich that he offers to Peter. Then he goes around to the other side of the bed and gives Derek something. “Caitlin said that probably will be okay, since they’re meeting with the Institute’s people too…but I’m not sure if that means everybody’s going to come here?”

“I…yeah, it might,” Stiles says, blinking. Then he suddenly remembers and he grabs for his phone, only to find that he doesn’t have it. He twists around, trying to recall where he left it. “Oh, shit! Dad! There’s no way he hasn’t heard by now and I didn’t call him—”

Scott frowns around, then looks down and goes ‘ah’ and reaches towards the floor right as Peter lunges at the same spot. Stifling a yelp, Scott jumps back and Peter gets Stiles’ phone, then hands it to Stiles. Who’d say something about areas of life that don’t require a pissing contest, except he’s busy wincing over all the messages he’s probably missed from his dad.

“You could’ve mentioned it,” Peter mutters, but when Stiles looks up, the other man is giving _Scott_ the glare.

“That…I was going to get food?” Scott says, confused. “Well, I—okay, but I just went downstairs.”

“He said stay on the couch,” Derek says under his breath.

“I thought that was so he could get the kanima samples,” Scott says, glancing between Derek and Stiles.

Peter lets out one of his sighs at the sheer density of other people. “Well, at least tell us you’re done moving your things over.”

“Yeah, we finished.” Scott still sounds as if he isn’t quite clear about what’s going on, but he also doesn’t sound as if he’s frustrated with Peter and Derek about it. And then he takes a seat on the bed, on the opposite side of Stiles as Peter’s on.

Stiles starts to look up, but just then his dad’s voicemail kicks in and he has to listen to that instead. It’s actually not as bad as he was expecting…but that’s because clearly, his dad has no idea that they were directly involved. The man just says he’s heard about the ghoul mauling and asks Stiles to try not to pry into it and to let the team handle it.

Then again, that call came in relatively early, Stiles realizes once he checks the timestamp. His dad probably left it as he and Allison were going downstairs to join Scott in the parking lot. Stiles scrolls through the rest of his notification history and doesn’t see another voicemail from his father, but he does have a few texts—so him quizzing the nurse has gotten back to his dad, and the fact that Scott’s making friends with the ghouls, but nothing else. Maybe his dad called it an early night and stopped checking?

Just in case, he tries calling back. Gets voicemail, to which he says: “Hey, Dad, so yeah, the mystery thing hunting the ghouls is not a mystery, and I really didn’t do anything to make that happen, for real, the mystery-uncovering happened _to_ me. And anyway, so I’m not in the clinic, or the psych ward, and I’m gonna contact the proper people in the morning, so I’ll just let them fill you in, and do their job, and all that good stuff. Oh, and also just so you know, perimeter wards are going to need a complete overhaul, we had a probable Asenath-level breach. Good night!” 

“Is he going to worry?” Scott says once Stiles gets off the phone. “Also, I’ve got green chile chicken or Cajun turkey left. Or I could—” he winces even before Derek and Peter glare at him “—I mean, if you want to go back down with Allison, they’ve also got a veggie option and a ham one.”

“I’ll take the chicken, thanks,” Stiles says, and then he thinks that came out pretty curt. He unwraps the sandwich and the smell of cold cuts suddenly makes his stomach shrivel painfully up against the bottom of his ribcage, as if it deeply resents him for reminding him food exists. “I mean, thanks, I kind of lost track of time.”

“Did you find out where you sent the kanima?” Scott asks, and then Derek and Peter glare at him _again_. This time, even Scott can’t just ignore it, and he stares back at them as if he’d like them to explain themselves (politely, in a constructive fashion, because it’s Scott, but still, sharing is necessary). But then Scott gives himself a shake. “Look, you know what, you must be really tired, and I’m guessing nothing’s happening for the rest of the night. Do you want to take your turn in the bathroom? I think the rest of us all have?”

Stiles is halfway through the sandwich, because shut up, stomach, he doesn’t need yet another fight he doesn’t understand. But he squeezes down his current mouthful so he can answer Scott. “I think I’ve got it narrowed down, but honestly, I…probably need some lab equipment to figure it out all the way. Need to do some things with the samples.”

“Well, take a shower and get some rest, and we can get on that in the morning,” Scott suggests.

He reminds Stiles a _lot_ of his mom right then, down to the way Stiles is pretty sure Scott will haunt him with a concerned look if Stiles doesn’t do that. And a shower is sounding pretty good, now that all of the research ideas are fading back in favor of bodily sensations like hunger pains and aching eyes. “Okay, yeah, but I—damn it, I also forgot, I was going to put up more—”

“Allison’s out in the living room with all of her weapons and also I think she’s on the phone to her dad about how to get more,” Scott says. Somehow, he manages to say that in a chipper, reassuring way and come off nurturing, rather than like a violent sociopath.

“Take a shower, Stiles,” Peter says. He’s still oddly subdued, and when Stiles checks, he’s not even giving Scott any resentful looks for taking over his Stiles-smothering shtick. If anything, he looks as if he thinks Scott actually has the right idea. “We’ll still be here.”

“Scott would say something,” Derek chimes in.

That is true, and what is also true is how Stiles is now wondering whether his problem has changed from his boyfriends’ obliviousness to their self-destructive behavior to them possibly being possession victims. And then he just grimaces and goes into the bathroom, because he’s already brought up Derek’s girlfriend record in the last twenty-four hours and okay, he has some justification for not trusting them _but_ that only justifies holding them to their word, not poking their other trauma buttons. Also he needs to clear his head before somebody tells him for the fourth time that he’s lost track of where his inner monologue is distributing itself. So, yeah. Shower. Good idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual American traditional folklore does rely on body parts like bones from a black cat (Zora Neale Hurston wrote a very upsetting description in _Of Mules and Men_ that cat-lovers should avoid), while Lovecraft gave one Cthulthosian-versed witch a rat-like familiar in _The Dreams in the Witch-House_.
> 
> I'm extrapolating all the stuff about a kanima's advanced forms, based on what seems like logical consequences of letting were attributes be dictated by your emotional and psychological problems (and ignoring the fact that Jackson was not the only character who got bitten while having pre-existing issues). If you've read a significant number of my endnotes, you'll know I roll my eyes at TW's "mythology" anyway.
> 
> Tennessee Williams, of all people, wrote a horror story about the evil Egyptian queen, Nitocris, in _The Vengeance of Nitocris_. The story isn't technically part of the Cthulhu Mythos (though Lovecraft and others did reference Nitocris, a semi-historical figure from Herodotus), but the prose style fits, in my opinion.
> 
> Lichs are Lovecraft's version of zombies.


	8. Chapter 8

Things are a little better once Stiles washes up and gets into clothes that aren’t saturated with desert dust. He feels a little more awake, and doesn’t have all those niggling physical distractions, and he’s actually better at thinking through the possible repercussions of changing up the syntax on an Aklo incantation when he’s got water pounding on his head than when he’s sitting there wondering when Peter and Derek are finally going to get around to saying something.

Yeah, and then he thinks about that and he just…he wishes he’d taken some psychology courses instead of the extra chem labs to bump his major from Abnormal to Xeno-chemistry.

Okay, not really. Miskatonic psychology majors basically are free labor for the administration to lean on for carrying out psych screenings on the rest of the student population, so they’re the most paranoid people on campus ( _security_ , on the other hand, actually gets to see the results so they know where the real threats are). But sometimes Stiles thinks about his dad telling him not to get too academic, and to remember the real world outside of the university, and he thinks…

“…still think you should just say that to him,” Scott is saying. “I think he’d get it.”

Halfway through twisting the doorknob, Stiles pauses. He didn’t put any extra soundproofing spells on the bathroom and it’s not like he’s been trying to be quiet, even if that would work with werewolves next door. But from the sarcastic way Derek laughs, the other three men clearly aren’t paying any attention to him.

“You think everybody’s going to get everything, right away,” Derek says. “Sure. And the fact that he was yelling about the exact opposite—”

“Well, I don’t think he meant it like that, he’s not like that. He was just really upset and…” Then Scott exhales as if he’s a little short of breath from defending Stiles.

Peter sighs. “He probably didn’t, I agree. _But_ —to Derek’s point, the fact that he was that upset also means something.”

“It means he cares. And you guys do too, or you wouldn’t be acting like this,” Scott says, earnest when anybody else would be frustrated.

“It’s not about _that_ , McCall,” Derek snaps. “It’s—you wouldn’t get it either.”

“This isn’t helpful,” Peter says over Scott’s attempt to reply. He pauses—Stiles can picture the exact shade of contempt on his face—then continues on in the kind of frictionless tone that intentionally gives you nothing to hook into. “It’s not. You’re only arguing with Derek now, and I don’t see how that helps anyone you consider a friend.”

Scott finally comes out with a frustrated noise, and that’s when Stiles’ rapidly-numbing hand loses its grip on the knob. The half-drawn bolt clicks sharply back and the voices in the other room go silent. Stiles just catches himself and _doesn’t_ apologize, and instead deliberately fumbles the knob again as he tugs unnecessarily at his shirt, like he’s still getting dressed. Then he goes back out into the bedroom.

Scott and Peter and Derek are all still on the bed, in basically the same positions as they were before. They haven’t even touched Stiles’ laptop, or any of the other things Stiles had scattered around it—Peter knows the password to the laptop and to Stiles’ library login, and he routinely tag-teams Stiles on research (to the point that Stiles is already looking into how he’s going to have to credit Peter on his dissertation), so again, not like him. Stiles is pretty sure if he logged in, he’ll see all of his searches and notes just as he left them.

“Hey, feel better?” Scott asks.

And suddenly, Stiles just—doesn’t want to do research anymore. He should, it’s not like they want the kanima to relocate first, but he just. He waves his hand noncommittally at Scott, then points at the other door. “I’m okay, I just—be right back, gonna get a glass of water.”

Scott nods and Derek and Peter do not object, and Stiles exits like the socially awkward excuse-making non-ninja he is. Even though he realizes halfway across the room that there’s a mostly-full water bottle sitting right on the desk he’s passing. Which Peter doesn’t point out. His boyfriend is disturbing him and he doesn’t know how to make it stop and he’s pretty sure that both of those points are directly the result of his actions.

“You’re still up?” Allison says, from where she’s sitting at the kitchen table with a really, really large rifle in her hands. And it’s not even completely assembled yet.

“Um. Yeah. Um…” Stiles points at the rifle.

Allison glances down, then blushes and hastily twists the barrel so it’s not pointing at him. “Sorry,” she says, though honestly, Stiles hadn’t even noticed where it was pointing till just now. “Didn’t mean to…oh, where did it come from? I always carry this around, it just would’ve taken too long to put together earlier, and I can’t keep it assembled all the time or I’d have to get a case that actually looks like a rifle case.”

“Okay, fair. I try not to make my phone look like a multi-purpose spellcasting tool either,” Stiles says.

She gives him an acknowledging smile, then sits there as if she’s expecting something else. Probably because he’s just standing there. He jerks into motion, grabbing a mug from the counter, and then slows down as she clears her throat.

“It’s already really late, are you really going to stay up?” she says, which makes him realize he’s turned towards the coffeemaker. “I mean, we do have to talk to people in the morning and if you want to be fresh for that…I know they’re Miskatonic people and everything, so they’re probably used to this, but—”

“But that’s definitely why they expect you to have your executive summary and your executables clearly outlined and backed up by at least three independent references,” Stiles mutters. That said, coffee is not actually his goal, so he turns towards the fridge. But then he remembers there’s nothing in it. Because they’ve only been in town two nights and a day, and haven’t even gone grocery-shopping yet.

Allison watches him sort of shuffle around the kitchen for a few seconds. She blinks slowly, then gives her eyes a rub as if she might doze off, the partly-assembled armory around her notwithstanding. Then she takes a deep breath. “Stiles, do you want to just sit down and talk?”

“About what?” Stiles says. He definitely doesn’t want to go out, but the food Scott brought is in the bedroom. He could actually get water from the fridge’s built-in dispenser, but then he’d feel like…like he honestly doesn’t want to be in a room with Peter or Derek and that’s just…not what he really feels. He’s not sure _what_ he’s feeling right now, but it’s not that.

“About them not telling you that somebody was trying to kill them, and not getting why that’s a problem?” Allison says.

Stiles whips around and stares at her. And while she does look satisfied that she’s put her finger right on it, it’s not in a smug way. Actually, she still looks tired.

“Yeah, I know,” she says. 

“Yeah, but—do you? I mean, I’m not saying this to be an asshole, but I just—I don’t know if Scott overheard and told you but—what they were—it’s just—” Stiles exhales, then gives up and drops into the chair next to Allison “—they just think this is _okay_. They get that it’s not normal, because they’re trying to keep it away from me, but aside from that they think it’s okay, and do you—do you understand what I’m saying?”

Allison nods and slouches a little in her chair. It’s not an attitude thing, she just wants to get her elbow down so she can prop her head against her hand. “It’s not that they didn’t tell you, it’s that they think it’s more important to not upset you than that they almost got killed in front of you, and you had to watch.”

For a second Stiles gapes at her. Then he pulls himself together, and puts the empty mug down. “You do get it. I guess—you go through this with Scott?”

“Well, not…exactly,” Allison says, shifting in her seat. Embarrassment briefly whisks over her face. “I was a hunter before I met him, and with my family…he actually spent more of his life free of people trying to kill him, even if sometimes it seems like he’s overdoing it, making up for that now—but no, look, both of us know we’re making enemies, and we…it’s not _easy_ to see it, but we do walk into it with open eyes.”

“Oh. Yeah. That makes sense,” Stiles says, and the tiny bit of hope that’d been rising in him crumples.

Allison seems to sense that, because she winces and then reaches across the table to poke his hand. “Hey, but I do get it. It might not be exactly the same way, but I get it. I…I get that there is a difference between doing something with risks, and something that’s a risk specifically for _you_.”

“No, yeah, that’s what I was trying to tell them,” Stiles says, looking up at her. “Because I get danger, right, Miskatonic has a general waiver that’s ten pages long and between my majors, I had to sign thirty more. But it’s just…this kanima came specifically after _them_. That—that doesn’t come up. Cthulhu doesn’t care whose mind it’s turning into raving mush, it’s an interdimensional alien that doesn’t even recognize us as sentient, and if you’re serving it, you’re buying into that too, that’s the entire point of the Great Old Ones. And being threatened by that just feels different.”

“Well, the thing is, most of the time with werewolves it’s personal. Or it might not start out personal, but it gets personal really fast,” Allison says. “I’m not trying to justify it, I’m just saying that’s what they’re used to.”

Stiles makes a face. “And I know that. I kind of got that from how Peter arranges his social calendar around his grudges. But why…”

“I think it’s because they really do think it’s their job to just fight off people trying to kill them all the time. You know, like it’s your job to be a student. So you’d probably think we’re weird if we asked you why you’re okay doing all those waivers,” Allison says.

“I know they’re long, but they do upfront all the risks and also if you want to negotiate with our legal department, I hope you’re prepared to cover off on your next five reincarnations too, and…okay,” Stiles says. He leans back and looks at the mug, idly tracing the cephalopod logo with one finger. “Okay. I…I guess I should’ve seen it coming, too. I mean, it’s not like they aren’t constantly talking about Derek getting kidnapped or Peter exacting hideous revenge on somebody in front of me. It’s just…seeing it happen, that’s not exactly the same.”

“We’re also pretty good at getting Derek back before much can happen, these days,” Allison says, as if she’s trying to make him feel better. “Look, honestly, I don’t think you’re ever really going to know how you’ll feel about it till it happens.”

And now it has, and Stiles can categorically say he hates it, with the passion of a thousand loosed Hounds of Tindalos. Also, he still doesn’t know how to make it never happen again. Unless he’s just going to keep everybody in a bedroom forever and ever, and he realizes that’s just insane, no eldritch horrors needed. “So how come you’re the one who gets this, if it’s not from being with Scott?” he asks, to distract himself.

“Well, that’s not totally…it’s not because of how he ends up with people after him, at least in the murdering sense,” Allison says, looking a little uncomfortable. She puts her hands on the table as if she’s going to get up, then sighs and sits back again. “This is going to sound weird, but it is because he…he has this habit of trying to fit into things, or places, or with people, because he thinks it’ll make my life easier, and he just doesn’t get that—that if _he’s_ not comfortable, I’m not either. And he is really friendly naturally, so I’m always just…wondering if he’s just being him or if he’s doing it for me, and it makes me feel really paranoid.”

“This wouldn’t have to do with the vibes over his new buddies the ghouls, would it?” Stiles says. 

It’s a shot in the dark, mostly coming out of his mouth because the way she looks uncomfortable now reminds him of the way she’d looked whenever Scott had called Caitlin, but she starts and he realizes he totally got it right. Then Allison lets out a half-sarcastic, half-embarrassed chuckle.

“I’m not jealous, I just want to be clear on that. I’m not freaking out thinking he’s cheating on me, because that’s always what people start thinking,” she says. She’s a little rushed about it, but slows down as she realizes Stiles isn’t going to interrupt her. “I’m not _that_ kind of person. That’s what I mean about wondering if I’m just being paranoid.”

“I was actually wondering if it was some kind of pack dynamic thing,” Stiles says. “You know, like he’s got packmate adoption issues. If it makes you feel better. I totally wasn’t going the jealous partner romcom route.”

Allison gives him a wry smile. Then she settles back and rubs at her face again; he thinks she’s stifling a yawn behind her hand. “Well, he does have those too, but I don’t think that’s it. It’s more like…Miskatonic is something that’s really completely not connected to my family, or to werewolves—don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing that they actually ask you in their on-campus housing questionnaire whether things need to be shifter-proofed. But I’ve spent…a _lot_ of my life doing things to make up for the rest of my family, and this isn’t—wouldn’t be one of them.”

“Which is totally okay. I mean, at least to me. Admittedly, I wasn’t around for all of that, so I don’t really have skin in the game,” Stiles says, and he can’t help the tinge of frustration that creeps into his voice when he says that last part. He’s been trying, and it’s not like people _don’t_ talk to him (Erica will give him the lowdown on just about anyone if he foots her party-planning expenses, and Cora occasionally gets in the mood for sibling-dirt-dishing), but there’s just so _much_ he wasn’t around for.

Like years, he thinks, and then he notices the sympathetic look that Allison’s giving him. But she doesn’t comment on that, just nods along with what he’s saying. “No, I think I’ve gotten over the whole doing-something-for-me guilt thing—Scott’s mom is great for talking that kind of thing out. But I guess that’s why it feels weird, it _is_ just for me, so I really want it to be something I’m doing because it’s a good fit, not because it’s—because it’s a place where I don’t have to worry as much about Scott getting targeted, or because he can make friends who he doesn’t have to hide werewolf stuff around, and so I just want to know he’s not getting co-opted into this? Does that make sense?”

“Well, yeah. Miskatonic is trying to recruit you, I don’t think you’re being paranoid about making sure that doesn’t involving luring Scott in,” Stiles says. Then he realizes how that probably sounds to a non-Miskatonic alumni and he hastily sits up. “No brainwashing or blackmail, okay, Dad would never stand for it, and also the ghouls are pretty independent actors so I don’t think they’d get involved unless they had their own plans—um, which came out much more evil villain than I meant.”

“No, I think I get where you were going.” Allison, thankfully, is staying calm about this. Although she might look a tiny bit reassured, and it might have more than a tiny bit to do with Stiles validating her fears. Stiles has noticed this about the Beacon Hills crowd, they seem more uncomfortable with unknown unknowns than known unknowns. “Anyway, I’m probably overreacting. Scott’s not an idiot, and it’s not actually that people can talk him into anything. He just wants to help too much, but that’s different.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s into the Institute or the ghouls just because of you, either,” Stiles offers. “I think Scott really just wants friends to talk about weird animals with.”

“Yeah. Yeah, probably. I just…I’m not used to us being able to have that, without some vendetta from the past coming up,” Allison says, sighing. “Though that lasted what, a day? And now we’re going to have to explain my whole psycho family to yet another bunch of Scott’s friends.”

“Well, look, ghouls are pretty chill about that sort of thing. They’re probably not going to blame you, or think you’re a bad person to be friends with. They usually just want clear guidelines about who they can and can’t maul if it comes up again,” Stiles says. Then he stifles his own yawn, and that makes him think…maybe he should just stop thinking for the night. No, he doesn’t have everything figured out, but talking to Allison has gotten rid of that anxious, low-level yet incessant stomach-clenching edge to his inability to figure it out. Maybe he should just try sleeping on it. “By the way, if you want me to say anything to Scott—”

Allison puts her hand out as Stiles starts to get up. The motion is a little sharp, but she softens it with a smile. “No. No, we should handle that ourselves. Just…you wouldn’t mind if he goes with me in the other bedroom, would you? Or Derek? I think that was Derek’s stuff in it.”

“Um, no, you know I don’t report to Melissa about you two, right?” Stiles says, a little confused, and then—right. “Oh. Yeah. So I’ve been—sorry, I didn’t mean to just go all psycho-denning on everyone like that.”

“Oh, I think they actually think that’s normal too,” Allison says. Then she reads Stiles’ expression and looks as if she regrets being so flippant. “Seriously, it’s not that big of a deal. Yeah, werewolves…if you’re thinking it’s an instinctual thing, you’re right, but they could have ignored it if they wanted to.”

Stiles looks at her. “But they didn’t, because they were worried. About me.”

“Well, honestly, Stiles, you _did_ look really upset. I can’t smell you or hear your heartbeat like they can, but even I thought a couple of times that you were going to pass out, you were so white in the face,” Allison reluctantly tells him. She looks him over, then gets onto her feet and gives him a hug. “Listen, it’s okay, you’re allowed to be upset. That stuff sucks, and even if they don’t really understand how much it sucks or why it sucks, it sucks and you’re allowed to say it sucks. But just maybe…try to explain that to them when your phone doesn’t have glowy tentacles?”

“It did? When did…you know what, never mind, I believe you,” Stiles sighs, and then he gets an arm up to hug her back. “Thanks. This…this helped, I think.”

“Hey, we’re friends,” Allison tells him with a smile. “You helped me, too.”

It actually takes a second for Stiles to figure out what she might be referring to. He momentarily reconsiders getting some coffee, then forces himself to not look at the mug. “Well, you know, Miskatonic’s not for everybody, and even when it’s your kind of place, it’s not exactly user-friendly. But for what it’s worth—I definitely think you can handle it, and I think you might even like some of it. And any time you want to check whether somebody’s manipulating your sanity using non-Euclidean methods, I’m here.”

“Thanks,” Allison says. Her enthusiasm has gone down some, but he doesn’t think it’s down to him. She just looks like she’s at that point where the emotions have burnt out, and she’s trying to sift through the ashes to find her options. “Pretty sure I’ll be taking you up on that.”

“I think Scott would be okay, too. And not just because he’s trying to make it easier for you—okay, he will, but he also has tested rock-solid on basically every mental fragility test Miskatonic’s ever come up with,” Stiles adds. “Honestly, I think he just likes—”

“Animals,” Allison supplies, her tone both resigned and fond. “And intelligent non-human species who happen to look like the animals he works on as a vet. Yeah, I know, I know we’ll be fine. I just…need a moment, I guess…”

She gets quieter as she talks, her eyes drifting away from Stiles to the opposite wall, and after another moment, Stiles just eases himself from the kitchen table. Allison glances back at him, then returns his nod as she sits up and reaches for her half-assembled rifle. They’ve said about all they can say to each other, and she is the kind of good person who just wordlessly is okay with that. She _is_ his friend, Stiles thinks, and not just Scott’s girlfriend.

* * *

It’s only a couple yards from the kitchen area to the bedroom so Stiles doesn’t think he needs to knock or anything like that, but when he opens the bedroom door, he catches Scott and Derek and Peter mid-conversation again. They obviously were not keeping tabs on his and Allison’s talk, which isn’t unusual for Scott (as multiple people, including a sheepish true alpha, have explained, bitten werewolves don’t automatically get upgraded multi-tasking and tend to fall back onto human habits of selective senses). Peter, on the other hand, once told Stiles in non-exaggerating honesty that he has to work up a sweat to not eavesdrop, while Derek’s rare attempts at sarcasm usually consist of him tagging a conversation he wasn’t physically in.

Nonetheless, Stiles actually is all the way in the room and there Peter is, back to him, telling off Scott: “I’ll thank you to keep your meddling to yourself, McCall. Derek never was your responsibility anyway, and he’s certainly in no need of becoming that, considering he managed living on his own across the country for _four years_ while you barely lived through high school.”

“That’s not what I was trying to say,” Scott says, his hands up with the palms out. He looks concerned, but it’s just regular concern because he hates making anybody irritated, and not like he thinks he’s being threatened. “Anyway, I know he’s your pack, I’m not trying to steal him or anything.”

“That’s not even the problem,” Derek mutters, rolling his eyes, and that’s why he ends up being the first one to notice Stiles. He goes stiff, hand half-carded in his hair. Then, very slowly, he pulls his hand out and puts his arm down and rearranges his posture from grouchy crouch to withdrawn huddle.

“No, that _is_ the problem, as a matter of fact, and if you’d just stop disbelieving that, _Scott_ wouldn’t consistently edge you in—” Mid-scathing retort, Peter picks up on the warning twitch of Derek’s brows. The line of his shoulders goes stiff. He pauses, takes a breath, and then turns around.

Scott’s finally also seen Stiles and pushes up on his knees to peer over Peter’s head, then gives Stiles a tentative wave. “Hey, you look…better? But also tired.”

“Yeah, I think I’m going to try turning in now,” Stiles says. He shuffles a little in place at how flat he sounds. “Going to sleep. So I’m not a total jerk in the morning.”

“Okay, that’s probably a good idea,” Scott says, encouraging, but also tentative; Peter and Derek are trying very hard to hide how surprised they are, and how much they really, really don’t know how to respond. He waits for Stiles to go on, then helpfully volunteers to take the strain off the silence that follows. “So, did you want this side, or—”

Stiles barely keeps himself from slapping his face. Not because he doesn’t deserve that, but because he has a feeling that that would just exacerbate Peter and Derek’s behavior. “You can go take the other room with Allison,” he says, as his cheeks start to burn. “I was, um, earlier the way I was acting, it was kind of—”

“Oh, okay,” Scott says, scrambling off the bed and coming around it so that he almost passes Stiles. Then he ducks back, keeping his head a bit lower than Stiles’ as he awkwardly grabs at the back of his neck. “I mean, if you’re going to be okay. Because I can just talk to Allison and she’s not going to read anything into it, she knows about pack cud—”

“That wasn’t really what I was doing, I was just being—anyway, no, it’s fine. She and I actually already talked and I’m good, I’m just—I’m just tired and just go sleep with your girlfriend, would you?” Stiles says. 

He tries to sound strong enough that Scott will stop looking so anxious about him, but he’s pretty sure that it comes out in asshole tones instead. Despite that, Scott nods, bobs in place one more time as his eagerness to go wars with his need to check Stiles over, and then he leaves. He closes the door behind him, which leaves Stiles looking at…

Peter’s turned himself all the way around, and when his and Stiles’ gazes meet, he…doesn’t flinch, but he definitely takes a moment to square up his shoulders. Then he lifts his chin and opens his mouth, and doesn’t actually say anything. Behind him, Derek looks like if Derek could be wallpaper, he’d trade his leather jacket for the glue to paste himself.

“I,” Stiles says, and he just isn’t going to figure out what to say to them tonight. He just…isn’t, and that’s not the most original or deep insight, but it’s a true one, and it rings inside of him in a way that can’t be ignored. And all the research, or the heartfelt talks, or the books in the first draft of Alhazred’s bibliography aren’t going to change that.

And also werewolves communicate a lot more than people do in body language and other forms of non-verbal communication, and maybe it’s just Stiles being useless in the innovation department right now, but his mind just latches onto that. So he sighs and walks to the bed, then climbs onto it and into Peter. Who offers no resistance, just blinks hard, as Stiles lets his body weight smush them over onto the bed.

“We’re gonna—” Stiles senses movement and sticks an arm out and _actually_ gets a piece of Derek. Which means Derek’s still so thrown that he’s just letting Stiles do that, but whatever, Stiles will take it. “—in the morning. We’re gonna, in the morning. But right now I just—I am really tired, and I wanna sleep, and can we just do that?”

Peter inhales and it goes all the way down into the pit of his gut, that breath. Stiles knows because of how his face is pressed against Peter’s chest, his hand against Peter’s belly, and through both of those points, he can feel the way Peter’s muscles are trembling against the air swelling them. Then Peter lets the breath out very softly, its passage barely riffling the top of Stiles’ head.

“Of course,” Peter says.

“You too,” Stiles mutters, as Derek’s arm shifts in its sleeve. “And I mean it, tomorrow morning—you too. Whatever the hell it is, and you and Peter can keep on sniping at each other if you want, but I was just as mad at you—I mean, about you—I mean—”

“Okay,” Derek mutters. His arm moves some more, but it’s going down towards the bed so he doesn’t appear to be running away. Then it stops moving and Stiles hears the _pfft_ of the pillow under Derek’s head. “I get it, okay. We’re both fucked.”

“Yeah,” Stiles mumbles into Peter’s check. Then he grimaces. “I mean, no. That’s not what I’m mad—”

“Stiles, it can wait till the morning,” Peter says.

Derek shifts and the two of them are probably eyeing each other again. But they don’t start arguing again. They also are still acting odd, with Peter just letting Stiles lie on them and not getting immediately handsy, but…not going to come up with a fix tonight, Stiles thinks. And closes his eyes, and just thinks about how very, very tired he is.

Just before he falls asleep, he thinks he feels Derek’s arm twist up so that Derek’s hand is leaning against his upper arm, and Peter’s arm gingerly slip across his back. So still not fixed, but at least…at least there’s this, he thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actually, I'm not sure I've ever come across a reference to a student dormitory in a Cthulhu Mythos story, but if Miskatonic has them, I think it'd be easier on the housing budget to just plan for supernatural goings-in in them.
> 
> The famous evil book to end all evil books, the _Necronomicon_ , was allegedly written by Abdul Alhazred.


	9. Chapter 9

When Stiles next drifts back to consciousness, it is to the familiar sound of bickering.

“I do believe you,” Derek’s saying. He’s shifted over so that his chin actually seems to be leaning on Stiles’ shoulder, and given that Peter’s annoyed snort comes down directly against the top of Stiles’ skull, the two of them must be nearly nose-to-nose. “You realize you’re yelling at me for not listening to you when I’m actually, literally telling you I heard what you said and it’s just not true?”

“This is not me yelling, Derek,” Peter seethes. “Believe me, there is never any doubt about when I am _yelling_ at you.”

Derek makes an aggravated noise. “So you’re doing it in a whisper so Stiles doesn’t wake up, it’s still yelling. And it’s still wrong, because I _get_ that you want us all to do this. I—look, just once can you let me finish? What I _don’t_ get is why.”

“Why what?” Peter hisses. “Why I’d want you in bed with us?”

“No, I get that,” Derek says.

“Well, good to know your self-esteem issues at least have a floor,” Peter swipes back.

Derek snarls and his chin lifts abruptly, as if he’s getting up. Then he stops. Sarcasm aside, Peter had actually tensed up when Derek moved, and he’s not getting any less tense under Stiles, who’s on the verge of making his conscious state known when Derek suddenly lets out a tired, dragging sound.

“I just want to know why you keep acting like I should like you now,” Derek says in an exasperated tone. Then he hisses under his breath, moving sharply against Stiles’ arm. “Wait. Not like—I didn’t mean like—”

“Well, I’m not really sure how else I’m supposed to take that, but I actually _would_ like you to be willing,” Peter says. His tone is so icy that it freezes Stiles in place, even though he clearly still hasn’t noticed Stiles is awake. “If you can’t believe I’m capable of respecting that boundary, at least believe that I find you far too tedious when you’re in a martyring mood.”

“That’s not what I meant! This is what I—I meant _this_ is what you’ve been my whole life! You’re sarcastic, and always pointing out what I’m doing wrong, and now you’re—you’re asking whether I’d rather we bring home the deer for later, or if I want you to talk to Stiles about labeling stuff in English, or if I need cover to sneak out and kill people so Stiles won’t notice!” Derek snaps, his voice swinging from defensive to alarmed to apologetic in practically the same word. He shifts till he sounds like he’s leaning right over Peter. “It’s just weird, all right? And I just—I know this is fucked-up, okay, but I just—I don’t know—what am I supposed to—”

Peter draws in a breath, and under Stiles his body loosens up considerably. “So…you’d find it more reassuring if I continued to treat you like an immature imbecile?” he says, half-skeptical, half-confused.

“Well…a little, maybe.” Derek is quiet for a second. “Look. I don’t _like_ you treating me like that. But I’m just saying I’m…well, I’m used to it, so that doesn’t throw me.”

“I’m dating you now, Derek,” Peter says, and for a second he sounds as sincere, and as sincerely uncomfortable, as Derek obviously is. Then he snorts. “I am, and I don’t date immature imbeciles, seeing as that would reflect just as poorly on me.”

“Thanks. I guess,” Derek says.

Peter snorts again, and from the way it trails off, Stiles has a feeling that he and Derek are having one of their mutual eye-rolls. But then Peter exhales again, and this time it comes out a little wistful. “I did always like you the best,” he says more quietly. “You don’t believe me, of course, but it never was particularly political for me to show it. Or for me to show that I liked anything very much, for that matter.”

“Is this about Mom?” Derek asks, after a moment. He doesn’t sound accusing, just curious.

“Yes,” Peter says, audibly startled. He sucks his breath, and then his shoulder flexes in a shrug under Stiles’ ear. “Well, not only her…not as much as I used to think, now that I can look back on it. And she did have her moments where I think she realized what I was doing, and what she was doing. But we’re Hales, Derek. The world’s never going to treat us fairly, no matter what we do within the pack.”

“Yeah, I know,” Derek mutters. His voice recedes and the mattress dips as if he might finally be moving away from them. “We did just fuck up things royally with Stiles—lucky if this wasn’t just something he did because he felt sorry for us, just before he breaks up with—”

“ _What_ ,” Stiles says, bolting upright, because just _where_ did that come from. “ _No_. What. No. How. I mean, you know your logic’s even further beyond human comprehension than Nyarlathotep’s riddles are, right?”

Derek stares at him from where the other man is sitting back on his heels and, apparently, just stretching out a kink in his back. Peter stares at him. They’re both doing that thing where their eyes are not exactly glowing, but there is this kind of tinge in their backs, like when it’s dark and the headlights aren’t catching them dead-on yet but it’s still enough to pick out their eyes. Which means they’re startled enough that a shift almost happened. 

Stiles flushes and…still stands by his comparisons, but maybe he could have eased into that one a little more. “Um, also, hi, it’s morning and…um, I wanted to…” he mutters, scooting off Peter. “…so, uh, what I said last night…”

“Wasn’t unmerited,” Peter starts, tone heavy, eyes focusing on Stiles’ chin.

“Okay, wait,” Stiles says. His thoughts are unfuzzing, and the first thing that clears up is how he definitely got his tone wrong last night. Allison has a point about them not being able to get past the tone—and he should _know_ that, with them being werewolves. “I just…let’s put aside me being upset for a second. I mean, I know I was, but I don’t want to just talk about that. I want to talk about what is really the issue here.”

“That wasn’t the issue?” Derek mutters. Then he hunches down defensively, even though Stiles doesn’t move or anything. “I’m just saying, I think I saw tentacles with teeth coming through that space-time rip thing you made.”

Stiles blinks. “I…made what?”

“I don’t actually think it was a rift, the geometry wasn’t right,” Peter says, but it’s more of an absent aside than a reprimand to Derek. He pushes himself up on his arms, then slides back so that he can rest against the headboard. “Stiles, Derek and I…we’ve talked about it. We know we should have told you sooner—that we shouldn’t have just assumed you’d be better off not knowing. And that was purely about us, because you’ve made it clear plenty of times you don’t mind—”

“We get you don’t care there’s a lot of fucked-up stuff in our past,” Derek breaks in. “And we get that that’s—that’s actually really a big deal, and we shouldn’t take it for granted—which is not what we were doing anyway, we just didn’t want you to have to deal with something that wasn’t even your problem.”

Peter’s eyes flick to Derek and some of the tension in the man actually goes away, because Peter’s clearly distracted with expecting Derek to word something wrong. Derek equally clearly knows what Peter is thinking, and starts eyeballing Peter instead of worrying about exactly what he’s saying, and so he starts interrupting himself less. And so neither of them is paying attention to Stiles. Which is both good and bad, since it gives Stiles a moment to collect his thoughts properly, but also, reminds him of the fact that once they deal with last night, they’ve still got to deal with this eternal mistrust thing the other two have going on.

“I was mad about that,” Stiles finally says. He waits for them to look back at him. “About hiding it from me. I’m still annoyed about it, but honestly, at this point it’s kind of—I mean, a fake heartbeat metronome? Really?”

“They’re actually rather convincing, to a werewolf,” Peter says, semi-apologetically, a hint of buttery charm coming through in his voice. “And we honestly did only think we’d be gone for a few minutes, not nearly long enough to be noticed. Which I realize is an excuse and not a justification.”

“But you’re trying to slip the justification in there anyway, as you do,” Stiles sighs. He makes a face at Peter, who shrugs to communicate his regret and also, to make Stiles’ eyes drop down to where a shirt hem has undoubtedly flipped up to show abs. Stiles refuses and makes another face at Peter, who looks as if he still thought it was worth a try. “But look, you’ve seen me pissed off before, and do I forget what spell I’m casting then?”

Peter starts to answer, then hesitates, his expression growing somber. “No,” he finally answers. “I think—”

“Nobody’s ever seen you look like that, even Scott was saying that,” Derek breaks in. “That’s why we were…if you thought we were acting weird, that’s why.”

“No, I get that, I just—do you get why, though? I mean, why I’d flip out like that?” Stiles asks.

It’s a rhetorical question, and he’s got a whole speech shaping up in his head about how he respects that they’ve lived a different life under different rules from him, but at the same time, he just needs to explain and for them to understand that he’s still going to have feelings about it based on _his_ life and the rules under which _he’s_ seen things work, when Derek just nods. “Yeah, it is really fucked-up that something like a kanima hunting us down years after we killed my ex-girlfriend just seems normal,” he says. “We should be more upset about it, but we really aren’t. Even Peter just takes it as another reason why we’re embarrassing.”

Stiles blinks.

For some reason, Derek just gets more defensive-looking, even though Peter isn’t saying anything and Stiles is pretty sure his expression is set to gobsmacked. “I get it. I mean, after a while even I thought it was too much, and that’s why I moved to New York,” Derek mutters, rubbing his face with his hand. “And it was…it was really weird for the first six months. I’d see somebody following me home and get ready and then realize we’re just taking the same train, and…I get it. I just—it’s just really easy to slip back into old habits, I guess.”

“Yeah,” is all Stiles can say. Except that really can’t be it, he needs to not let this just sit _here_ , and so he racks his brain for something more thoughtful. “It’s just I really don’t want to see you two die and the idea that somebody else, that’s their entire _plan_ , and not trying to become powerful or upend the cosmic balance…that all they want to do is kill you, I just…all I can say is what the hell is that? Do they really not have better things to do with their lives?”

“Stiles,” Peter says. He starts out strongly enough, then just shakes his head. He’s smiling and it’s a little twisted at the corners. A little surprised, a little bitter, a little…just plain wondering, Stiles decides. “Stiles. This is—this is _exactly_ why we’d try so hard to keep that kind of thing out of your life. Which, again, we know that can’t be how it’ll be going forward, but—but it’s new to us. And just very…very rare. Very.”

Derek snorts and rubs at the side of his neck. He got rid of the leather coat at some point, and actually just is in a tee and his boxers, relaxing his crouch into a slouchy cross-legged sit. “Also, no, they don’t, the whole point of a kanima’s just to do whatever their master feels like, and apparently, the last thing Kate was thinking when she died was killing us…look, we’ll write up a list for you. Peter and I were talking about it, we’ll put something together. With footnotes and all that.”

“Footnotes,” Stiles says.

“Yeah, you like those, right?” Derek says, taking his hand down. He looks up at Stiles, with a brief detour to scowl at whatever expression Peter has on his face. “You put them on everything.”

“That’s because I have citation rules to follow, since if you can’t get those right, how is the admin going to believe you actually read through their manual for not accidentally invoking the Great Old Ones through the _Necronomicon_ , and anyway. You don’t have to do the footnotes if you don’t want to,” Stiles says, trying not to sound too much like an uppity academic. Because honestly, truly, he is touched that Derek would even _notice_ that kind of thing.

Fortunately, Derek seems more bemused than offended. “Well, you’ll make them anyway, you always do that. You did that the one time I gave you a grocery list.”

“Because it was just a _list_ and I wasn’t sure whether you meant free-range, grass-fed, or grain-finished beef, and that’s before you even get to the breeds because I know they all taste different to werewolves and…” Stiles pauses at the contortions Derek’s face is doing “…I shouldn’t trust Cora and Scott on that?”

“ _Oh_ ,” Derek says, sounding both knowing and weary. “Well, they do taste different, but I don’t really care. Cora’s just snobby about beef and that sounds like you were asking Scott when he was doing that large-animal course. He gets weird like that, you should’ve seen him when his vet school had him on rabbits.”

“Okay, well, noted,” Stiles says. A small, but awkward, silences falls as he fidgets with the sheets. “I was…I was just trying to make sure I had things down for you. You’re kind of hard to, well, figure out.”

Behind him, Peter inhales a little, and he thinks the other man’s going to jump in, but Derek looks past his shoulder and instead there’s some body language stuff going on, which makes Derek look briefly as if he might excuse himself to go punch through a wall. But then, before Stiles can turn around and see for himself, Derek straightens up like somebody’s holding him up by the hair (Peter’s glowers can have that effect on his family, it’s just Peter usually goes for the put-down instead).

“I’m—I’m okay. You don’t have to do that,” he mutters. “I mean, I like you. We talked about this.”

“Yeah, we did but that was kind of like curriculum intro day, like I thought we were just setting out the steps going forward. But the syllabus is just a roadmap and not the actual course itself, and…you know, any time the school references get annoying, you can just say,” Stiles says, thinking he can see a muscle trying to tic in Derek’s cheek. “I’ll stop.”

“They’re not annoying,” Derek says, though his stiff posture isn’t particularly convincing. He seems to get this and then is genuinely annoyed, jerking his head to the side so that his neckbones audibly pop. “You’re not—look, I’m bad at this. The last couple times I tried to date somebody, not just pick them up, they decided they wanted to kill me. I still haven’t figured out what I did there and I just don’t…especially since Peter’s involved…”

“Obviously, at this point I’m not going to kill you, Derek,” Peter mutters, and then huffs a breath, signaling that wasn’t _actually_ supposed to come out, but now that it is, he’s not going to contradict it.

“Yeah, well, anyway, I’m just trying to not get _another_ kanima set on my trail for almost a decade, and not killing me doesn’t really limit you that much,” Derek snaps, twisting over. Then he pulls up short, eyes widening a little. His hands go up to almost graze at Stiles’ sides, then drop back down to the bed.

Stiles wasn’t actually trying to intercept him like Derek obviously thinks; it was pretty clear he and Peter were just backsliding into bickering again. But he had been reaching out to Derek, which had shifted his weight off a leg that immediately announced it was numb and now it’d like to spasm, so he’d skewed some and Derek had coincidentally started crowding in on Peter at the same time. So anyway, Stiles had needed a handhold and Derek’s shoulders had been at the right height and now he’s sort of sitting on the guy.

“Um,” Stiles says, as they blink at each other, and then Stiles remembers why he’d been reaching out to Derek. “Listen, I think we all get that we’ve got different perspectives and getting used to that will take adjustments but can I just opinionate that _maybe_ it wasn’t you, in those relationships? Also, I’m not going to kill you over a relationship, because, um, that’s not how I grew up?”

“Stiles, this isn’t a cultural issue,” Peter says, sounding like his sense of humor is strangling his disbelief. “You’re not going to _cause offense_ by defending us.”

“Well, I just want it to be clear!” Stiles says, though he’s still mostly facing Derek and Derek’s continuing look of surprise. “I think it’s all bullshit and I don’t want you to be _afraid_ of dating me! I’m just—I just study eldritch horrors, I’m a grad student! I don’t actually use them! I mean, most of the time, when I’m not freaked out of my mind because my boyfriends are going to get sucked into a boobytrapped space-time rip because somebody forgot to reset dead psycho ex-girlfriend’s brainwashed lizard hench—”

Derek’s tongue is in his mouth. Stiles stutters a little, then panics and squeezes at Derek’s shoulders, thinking that might knock it out. Because it’s actually not been in his mouth before this, and now that it is…Derek’s still looking at him, eyes open, and those light touches on Stiles’ waist are Derek’s hands, not quite settling. At this range things are a bit blurry but Derek doesn’t look as sure of himself as you’d think for somebody who just did that with his tongue.

A second passes. Behind them Peter breathes in and Stiles sees Derek’s brows twitch together, and then the palms spread against Stiles’ hips and the tongue in his mouth moves. Still tentative, but it’s enough so that Stiles lets his lips relax till they’re fully pressing back against Derek’s mouth and Derek shifts and something about the way the warmth of his chest suddenly comes through their shirts sends a shiver through Stiles. He leans into the kiss and Derek’s tongue twists along his teeth, then slips over them and runs over the roof of his mouth towards the sensitive soft palate and okay. Okay, this is a nice alternative to arguing.

Stiles tugs at Derek’s shoulders, trying to get a better angle on what their tongues are doing, and moves himself off-balance again. Before the yelp’s much more than a tickle in his throat, Derek rolls them down against the bed, Stiles on top, and at that point, Stiles realizes he’d closed his eyes. Because he opens them again, and Derek’s got his eyes screwed shut and looks like that is the best thing in the world, because otherwise he wouldn’t be moving in the criminally _hot_ way he is, arching his head back as the ridiculously taut muscles in his thigh rub up against Stiles’ crotch.

“Not that we shouldn’t talk, too, but I think that does decisively demonstrate he’s interested in you,” Peter comments. From the side, where he’s slid down to lounge and laze his gaze all over them, like the equal-opportunity kinkster he is.

Derek grunts, irritated, and his teeth catch Stiles’ lower lip between them in a really—but then he breaks off the kiss before that can go anywhere. “So this works?” he says.

“What, shock kisses?” Stiles blurts out. He blinks his brain back into commission. “Um, yeah. This is cool. Definitely not kill-worthy. Actually—”

So he dips down and kisses Derek, and just before their mouths meet, he thinks he glimpses the other man looking startled. But Derek is nothing if not fully dedicated to the actual kiss itself, one of his hands slowly starting to push up Stiles’ shirt on one side. Then it freezes in place when Stiles tries moving his thumb along the tightened ridge of the tendon running up Derek’s neck. Derek goes tight all over, actually, tight and then suddenly loose as a deeply pleased noise rumbles up out of him into Stiles’ mouth.

Nice to know the werewolf sex moves carry over and…right. Stiles lifts his head again and looks at Peter, who is still lounging, but who is not quite as good at looking patient about that as he was a moment ago. “So about being afraid I’m going to act like every other idiot or sociopath that you’ve run across…”

“You _did_ move out of Beacon Hills before those formative teenage years,” Peter muses, and then he drops the act as he leans forward. For a moment it looks like he’s going for Stiles’ mouth, but then, instead, his brow presses against Stiles’ temple. He sucks in a deep breath, holds it, and then lets it out in a long sigh as he twists his head to graze his lips in a soft arc across Stiles’ cheek and jawline. “That is something to guard. I’d rather not have it adjusted, to be honest.”

“And I’ve got a couple werewolves with murder in their baggage,” Stiles says. When Peter makes a minute move backwards, he yanks his hand up and hooks it around the back of Peter’s neck. “I know that. I’m gonna help work on cleaning that baggage _out_. With my crazy Miskatonic skill set. Okay?”

Peter looks at him, with eyes way warmer than the stone-serious expression, and then dips again. Presses his forehead against the side of Stiles’ throat this time. That’s a werewolf move, something about pledging, Stiles can’t remember exactly what just right now, and then Peter twists and pushes his brow up along Stiles’ jaw before catching Stiles’ mouth in a hard, deep kiss.

Stiles’ hand slides up into Peter’s hair, then snarls in the thick curls as Peter goes after every one of his oral weak spots in rapid succession. He’s half-aware of Derek moving and making noises under him, some of them annoyed—Peter’s far enough over that he must be lying at least partly on Derek—but Derek’s hands are still under his shirt, so he doesn’t think the other man is leaving. Still, he grabs with his free hand, pulling at Derek’s shoulder to try to communicate that the man should stay put.

That doesn’t work _exactly_ to plan, as suddenly Peter pulls back and, once Stiles gets over his instinctive protest, he sees why: Derek’s levered himself up on his elbows so that his nose is nearly running into Peter’s ear. Peter turns his head and they eye each other long enough that Stiles can’t help a nervous throat-clearing.

“So, um, I did interrupt earlier,” he says when they look at him. “Um, and it actually sounded like you were getting somewhere with the whole, um—”

“Trying to change the habits of decades without taking it as a sign that the other’s lost their mind?” Peter helpfully fills in.

He’s being a little sarcastic, but he could be more, and the tone of the sarcasm doesn’t seem specifically aimed at anyone. He’s also still keeping tabs on Derek, to the point that Stiles feels him start when Derek _doesn’t_ get hostile, and in fact just rolls his eyes. “Well, I get possessed and Peter gets blackmailed all the time by people he forgot he fucked with back when everyone was scared of my mother,” he says. “It’s going to take a while.”

Peter’s expression shifts from surprised to annoyed, and then, as Derek’s mouth thins warily, something in the neighborhood of impressed. “But it is never too late to change, or so McCall claims.”

“If you’re listening to him now, that’s not really helping with getting used to the new you,” Derek says. 

He’s joking. Stiles thinks he’s trying to make a joke, behind the scowl and mutter, and after a moment, Peter’s brows tic up like he recognizes that too, and is _not_ impressed. And then, while Derek’s scowl deepens to cover what might be the start of an awkward stare—Peter sighs and twists over a little more and kisses Derek. Whose eyes bug out enough that it completely knocks his face out of its grimace, and watching that is almost so fascinating that Stiles misses the fact that Peter and Derek are _making out_ and. So. Yeah.

Peter presses in, pushing Derek’s head back into Stiles’ arm. His eyes are open, a little—slitted. And there’s kind of an aggressiveness to how he’s moving, almost shoving himself into Derek, and Stiles just recognizes that move, that implicit dare to do something about it, when Derek’s eyes suddenly narrow too. Derek’s shoulder moves slightly against Stiles’ wrist, then stops moving, period. Like this is the line in the sand, or the rumple in the sheet, and they’re not going any further, no matter how prettily Peter undulates against him.

And Peter’s rubbing himself, seriously. He kind of knees Stiles out of the way, trying to spread his legs, and Stiles’ hand slips from the back of his neck to his bicep. He looks up at the squeeze, without taking his mouth off Derek’s, and a flash of apology gets halfway into his eyes before Derek grunts and hauls up a knee on either side of Peter’s thigh, and clearly, from the way Peter shudders and his eyelids go half-mast over bleared-out eyes, this is a good thing. You know, if Stiles couldn’t already tell from the way Peter’s back bows down into it and then swings up again as it flows into his ass, bobbing high at a ridiculously prominent angle and yes, Peter has to wear the really tight silk boxers that show off how his glutes dimple when they clench.

Derek makes this noise. Not a grunt, deeper and more urgent than that, with a vibrating tail that has Stiles squirming up by the headboard, semi-mindlessly tugging down his underwear, as he belatedly realizes he’s just completely rolled off the two of them. Which seems to be better for them, seeing how roughly they’re rutting against each other, and honestly, probably he doesn’t want his dick squished into that. Probably he’d rather be up here, in the free and clear, watching the way that Derek’s fingertips are digging into Peter’s waist so deep the flesh under them goes white, listening to how Peter just groans and jerks those hips down, where he can control just how tight the fingers around his cock are. Can nudge his thumb right up behind the head in time with the squeeze of Peter’s buttocks under those boxers, can flex his fourth and pinky finger right when Derek hikes his knees and gets one leg around and rams his heel down into Peter’s calf, pressed so hard up into Peter that there’s a legit gap between him and the bed and.

And. And Stiles keeps watching, confused going to disbelieving, as Peter finally wrenches his mouth away from Derek, gasping, a fierce shiver taking over his head and shoulders. Hint of fang peeping out, the Miskatonic-trained field observer part of him notes, but most of him is noting that that shiver is _definitely_ pitched to trail off. “Um, you’re done?” he blurts out.

Peter starts to look at him, then gets knocked slightly askew as Derek humps up into him. Derek snarls hoarsely, undeniable fang showing, and then flops back with his mouth hanging open enough to show the teeth have all gone human again. Then he frowns as Peter jerks himself back into place. “What?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean—I just—that was kind of fast,” Stiles says, as Peter, still too out of breath to say anything, nods at him. He starts to lift a hand to rub the heat out of his cheeks, then hastily puts it down as he remembers that’s his dick-hand and it does have some precome on his fingers. “Not that—that I’m criticizing or anything, you guys take your time, or not, or. Um.”

“Several years of pent-up frustration isn’t exactly conducive,” Peter starts muttering, huffy tone clearly leading up to a killer slam, and then he lets out an outraged yelp as Derek glances up at Stiles, rolls his eyes, and suddenly gloms onto the end of Stiles’ cock.

Well, Stiles thinks, scrabbling for a handhold as his spine decides it’s going to take a vacation right into Derek’s hot, sucking mouth, it _was_ kind of there. And better in Derek’s mouth than poking out an eye or something and Derek’s clearly better with just going for it. Once he decides what it is, and right now, ‘it’ apparently is showing Stiles’ backbone such a good time that Stiles’ hips want to join in now too.

Derek seems curiously unconcerned with the danger of Stiles smothering him, at least judging by how he ignores Stiles’ sudden pelvic jerk towards his face. Nope, just keeps sucking. Peter, on the other hand, hauls himself around and gets his hand up to Stiles’ thigh, helping out with the whole don’t-suffocate-the-werewolf-on-my-dick thing. Then keeps on going, no longer annoyed but _smirking_ , sure, he can smirk when Stiles is going to break a lung heaving for breath like this and then he dips and starts mouthing his way up Stiles’ stomach, like he figures Stiles doesn’t need any working torso muscles either.

Peter gets to around the bottom of Stiles’ breastbone before Stiles manages to get his spasming hands around the man’s head, and then allows Stiles to yank him up. For—well, Stiles was thinking kiss, but right then Derek’s tongue flicks against his cock head and the shudder that overtakes his entire body doesn’t really let him coordinate that much. He ends up mashing Peter’s face into his neck, chin grinding against Peter’s cheekbone, as Derek sucks the last of his skeletal coherency out of him. But it’s okay, Peter’s making that low vibrato that he keeps insisting isn’t a ‘purr’ because were _wolves_ and whatever. Anyway, means he likes it. Which, at the end of the day, is pretty much all that Stiles wants.

At some point Derek shimmies up too, though he doesn’t get as far and settles about mid-abdomen on Stiles. He twitches when Stiles touches him—Stiles’ hand is still shaky and he twists past Peter’s head to see if maybe he poked the guy’s face—and then puts his cheek down and lets Stiles rest a couple fingertips against his neck. He’s back to looking a little uncertain about this, under the furrowed brows, but it doesn’t seem to be the kind of uncertain where he’s not sure about liking it.

“So,” Stiles finally says. “Not experiencing any urges to plot the overcomplicated murder of you and your nearest and dearest.”

Derek stares up at him, expression unchanging, and a sudden cold stabs into Stiles’ gut. He starts to apologize for being an asshole and then Derek shrugs. “I never really thought it was the sex, that always went okay,” Derek says, completely seriously.

After a moment, Stiles gets his jaw to work. And pushes himself up so that both of them look at him, then rolls his eyes at himself and puts his hands back on their necks so they stop looking worried. “Okay, I’m just gonna—one, that was not ‘okay,’ that was awesome. And two, I’m gonna—we’re gonna—it’s totally going to get better,” he finally comes up with. “Not just the sex, all the other stuff too. And what I _am_ experiencing is a strong urge to misuse my academic studies for personal reasons, like in some kind of intricate multi-incarnation vendetta, and oh, my God, I think I get it now.”

Derek cocks his head, then glances sharply at Peter, who sighs and leans forward and just rests his head against the side of Stiles’ face. Stiles absently reaches up and pets him, and he slips so that his lips brush against Stiles’ jaw as he talks. “Not that we’re at all opposed to such things, being werewolves,” he says, tone steady and mild but un-ignorable, just like the light pressure of his head. “But it’s also not required, Stiles. Just…admired.”

“I also get that this is totally a turn-on for you, and you’re pathologically unable to _not_ bring this back to future sex opportunities,” Stiles mutters. When Peter pulls off him, he gives the man’s hair a tug and Peter promptly stops. Raises his brows like he doesn’t know what Stiles means, then lets that utterly satisfied smile spread over his face as Stiles sighs and also can’t not kiss him. “Just don’t start getting me excited over corpses, okay? I get along with ghouls, I don’t want to _be_ one.”

“And I think we’re both quite happy with you exactly as you are,” Peter says, still smiling, though its warmth isn’t coming entirely from the smug end of the spectrum. He looks over Stiles a last time, then sighs and pulls completely back. “Speaking of which, we are due to speak to them, aren’t we?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to say, it's been really interesting to take Stiles as the outsider coming into all of the longstanding Beacon Hills drama, and see how he reacts to things that even Scott, soft touch that he is, doesn't even notice anymore. In addition to indulging my Lovecraft fascination, this series has let me take on the Derek-Peter-Stiles relationship from a different angle ([Sustainable Management](https://archiveofourown.org/series/314537) isn't quite the same since Stiles comes into the picture with his own set of family tragedy, whereas here he's pretty angst-free).
> 
> Lovecraft's whole gamechanger for horror fiction was the fact that before him, horror mainly focused on personal issues. They might have been totally irrational, but still, you could trace the reason for why a horror arose to some kind of conflict between people. He was the first writer to really bring home how terrifying things are when they _aren't_ personal, and in fact, our terror is completely beneath the notice of whatever is terrifying us. Even his human villains tend not to have personal vendettas, and destroy lives simply because that happens to be on the way to a greater goal of attaining more cosmic evil knowledge or something like that. And Stiles being used to that, that's how Derek and Peter are outsiders in _his_ world. They have fundamentally different experiences of how evil works.


	10. Chapter 10

“Morning!” Scott calls out cheerfully, from where he’s sitting with Allison and two ghouls in the living room. “We left breakfast for you in the bags in the kitchen.”

Stiles stops in his tracks, wishing that he’d washed up more before coming out. And maybe bothered to pull on different clothes—sure, he changed his underwear, but since he was just coming out to see what the food situation was, he’s still wearing the same shirt. Also he’s suddenly, acutely aware of the fact that his semi-distracted morning run through the bathroom (shut up, he’s human and Derek and Peter were _helping to wipe each other down_ ) missed a couple spots of dried spit on his neck. 

“Or here, what do you want? I can just get it and you can have it in the bedroom if you’re still getting ready,” Allison says as she gets up from the couch, accurately reading the shade of red currently covering Stiles’ face. “We’ve got breakfast tacos in egg and cheddar or jalapeno cheese and beans.”

“If it’s the sex-smell, we don’t mind,” says the female ghoul crouched by the coffee table. She offers Stiles a friendly wave while Allison and Scott both wince. “Humans are so odd about that kind of thing. You know we smell it under the soap, don’t you?”

“So, um, Stiles, this is Caitlin,” Scott blurts out. He jerks off the couch and starts gesturing frantically at each of them. “She came over with, oh, also, this is Charlotte, her cousin, they both were checking out the tunnels the kanima was using.”

Caitlin is slightly closer to regular human complexion than Charlotte, though both of them definitely would photograph better in black and white. She pushes back from the table and lopes over to Stiles, holding out her hand as he hastily bobs his head in standard ghoul greeting. Then she grins at him as they shake on top of that. “Nice to meet you,” she says. “Heard a lot about you. Your father come too?”

“Um, no, this isn’t a business trip. I’m—I’m doing some research in the pre-conquistador records for my dissertation,” Stiles says, his face still burning. He absently scrubs at the damp spots on his neck. “Dad’s up by the San Francisco office—I can call him if you need to get in touch?”

Charlotte raises her head, meeping, and then ducks in a distinctly embarrassed way when Caitlin gives her over-the-shoulder side-eye. “Nope, I think we have it in hand. It’s only some of us still are very impressed with that shoggoth he froze in the Boston underground. He has fans.”

“Oh, I’ll…warn him. I mean, let him know,” Stiles says.

Caitlin turns back and gives him an even bigger grin. She’s not wearing any make-up, but she does have facial tattoos scrolling down along her hairline that help minimize the prominence of her muzzle. Until her lips split, and then the gleam of her teeth reminds Stiles that ghouls can open their mouths an average of fifteen percent farther than humans can. “Warn him is closer to right. Anyway, we came to talk about this kanima, before the University gets involved. They never know what to do about these.”

“Oh, you—they aren’t looped in yet?” Stiles says, frowning. “Wait a sec, my dad—”

“If he was here, we would talk to _him_ , we know his reputation. But the Institute is different. They can hear of it after we lead the kanima from the Dream Lands,” Caitlin says dismissively. She’s cocking her head this way and that and it’s distracting up till Stiles realizes that she’s trying to see _around_ him. “Are we waiting?”

Stiles starts to ask her waiting for what, and also why are the Dream Lands involved, and what’s wrong with the Institute team. But he’s only human, so he can’t actually ask those all at the same time like his mouth is trying to do.

Caitlin bobs up briefly, just long enough to make him realize that if she _did_ stand completely upright, she’d crush him at basketball, literally, then drops far enough that he thinks her head might hit his hand. He pulls that up and out of the way and she levels out with a long sniff. “Virile,” she says, like somebody else might tasting notes on their wine. She cocks her head again. “Those usually want to walk their territory.”

“Wha…oh, um,” Stiles says, as his eye catches on something on the side of his hand and he suddenly realizes what she’s sniffing: the spit he’d wiped off his neck. “Ah. Oh, um, Derek and Peter—they’re my—”

“Yes, the sex,” Caitlin notes equably. She doesn’t so much as twitch an ear (hers are slightly less elongated than a typical ghoul’s, but they still look fully swiveling from where Stiles is) as the bedroom door suddenly clatters open behind Stiles. “I’m mated for the coming season, Charlotte’s weaning her litter, you can be calm. You never are, but I will tell you that anyway.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Derek says. Judging from the way Scott jumped up again, caught himself mid-extension and is now wobbling, Derek and Peter have aborted whatever hunting move they were about to make.

“Werewolves,” Caitlin says meaningfully, with shades of amused older sister too. At the coffee table, Charlotte heaves a long sigh, seconding the opinion (Scott’s sat back down on the couch, and he and Allison both look like they want to apologize _so_ much, to everyone including themselves). “Sex. So serious about how little you know. Just as bad as humans that way. Makes no sense with your noses, but it’s true. Anyway. Your kanima.”

“Um, yeah, yes! Let’s talk about that,” Stiles says. He starts to follow Caitlin as she turns and saunters back to the living room, then stops and checks that Derek and Peter are okay with that. Or at least not about to start a brawl.

Derek still has his claws halfway out, but his hands are hanging loosely at his side. When he realizes Stiles is looking at him, he shrugs curtly, pulls in the claws, and comes up next to Stiles. Peter looks…less amused than Stiles would have predicted, given he actually has prior firsthand experience with ghouls, but he also comes along.

“The tunnels needed work anyway. That was our fault, we didn’t turn the compost enough to see where the spells were coming undone,” Charlotte says. She makes room for Caitlin at the table, then spreads something out on it: a roll of parchment with a map of Sarkomand on it. “We are fixing them now.”

“The University has no say in that tunnel. We reclaimed it, not them. It is ours to fix. But they grow nervous over such things, and think they can say when and where we cross to the Dream Lands,” Caitlin says, still in that steady, unruffled tone. Before she sits down by Charlotte, she adjusts the pillow she’s borrowed from the couch to better support her tail. “The Dream Lands are the Dream Lands and belong to nobody in this waking world. Even the likes of Carter only have possession when they enter on its terms. But this is not important. Your kanima is there.”

Charlotte points at the map. “This is the land we took from the moon-beasts many dreams ago. We do not live there, but we keep it. They cannot ever have it again. It is a place that is no place. This is where your kanima is.”

“So if somebody has an identity crisis jacked up by some panicky Aklo combinations, they might be drawn there,” Stiles translates for the benefit of the non-Miskatonic-educated. “Also, just for the record, it’s not ‘our’ kanima.”

“It’s someone we used to know, and we’re trying to help them,” Scott says earnestly, ignoring the looks Derek and Peter are sending his way. “Like I said, a kanima doesn’t remember who they are, or even that they were once something—someone besides a kanima following other people’s orders. So if we can just get them to remember—”

“It has wings, McCall. It’s too far gone,” Peter says. “You might make a career out of pursuing fool’s errands, but as far as I’m concerned, our only obligation is to put the grudge that made it to an end.”

Scott starts to get up again, all determined, and Allison hastily grabs his arm so that she can stand up beside him. Peter rolls his eyes and Stiles…almost intervenes, but doesn’t, because the ghouls are conferring with each other in low gibbers (that word only sounds hilarious because you’ve never heard a ghoul talk, and if you did, you’d realize it’s plain old onomatopoeia). They look pretty intense about it, and then Charlotte puts her hand down on the table, loudly, and pushes herself up till she’s about eye-level with the rest of them.

“What was their name?” she asks.

She’s mostly looking at Peter, probably because he’s eldest. Peter hesitates, possibly because she’s also drawing her lips back a little more than strictly necessary for speech, and while werewolf fangs are built to tear, ghoul teeth are built to crush thighbones, and Scott jumps in. “Bennett. We knew him, before he was bitten.”

“Do you have images of him? And of the kanima he became?” Caitlin asks.

“Um, probably…somewhere,” Scott says uncertainly, looking back and forth between them. “I mean, of him, for sure, he—”

“He used to work for my dad, I might have something,” Allison says reluctantly. She visibly swallows and Scott quietly wraps an arm around her waist. “Or I think his parents memorialized his Facebook page, we could find something on that. I don’t know about the kanima, that was a really long time ago, when we were just—we weren’t really working together the way we do—”

Derek is looking through his phone. “No, I got him last night. I mean, the lighting wasn’t great, but if you need it…what do you need it for?”

“Gimp,” Caitlin and Charlotte chorus.

Everyone looks at them. Then they all, except for the ghouls, look at Stiles, who stifles a sigh. Sometimes holding yourself out as the Miskatonic expert results in moments like this, where you have to explain: “No idea, is this a Southwest thing?”

“No, it’s software,” Caitlin says. She’s still sitting down and has pulled out a tablet from a bag lying between her and Charlotte. “I mean that we take the images and put them together and show him how to transform. The East Coast has pledged fealty to Photoshop, but they are too conservative. They still eat the embalmed despite studies showing this causes dental issues.”

“This is good enough, we have somewhere to put the head,” Charlotte notes, leaning over her to look at Derek’s phone. She smiles when he starts back from her and Peter silently steps up to Derek’s shoulder, putting one hand on it as they both eye her teeth. “If he has forgotten, we will show him. This is what we do with our kind who pass too often and forget as well.” 

“Oh, really? That’s all it takes?” Scott says. “That’s great! So we can—”

Charlotte snorts and waves a dismissive hand as she stoops beside Caitlin. “No, no. You must show the mash-up in the Dream Lands and invoke the powers of Nodens, and then return with them through the gate of horn. And then the mind will revert but the body will take longer. Flesh does not like to change.”

“Wait, so you mean he’ll remember who he is, but still be stuck in a kanima’s body?” Allison says, starting to look alarmed. She tugs hard at Scott’s elbow. “Even before he changed, he had a grudge against us, Scott. I mean, that’s how Kate lured him away. Maybe we should think about this first.”

“If you’ll recall, he did attempt to murder you before Kate Argent bit him, and he didn’t miss by much. I might have gone with the hunt-gone-wrong scheme myself, if I’d been in his position,” Peter drawls. He glances at Stiles, then at Derek, and then goes on in a considerably less mocking voice. “And after he was bitten, he gave my family more than a couple bad nights. _And_ he just mauled the two of us again, only last night. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about a plan that lets him become more effective at trying to kill us, and I’m not about to sacrifice my family and my pack on the altar of your good Samaritan principles.”

Scott squares up his shoulders to Peter. “It’s not just about that. If he remembers who he is, we can reason with him.”

“Because he’s just going to stop hating the people who tricked him into the hunter life, just because you tell him to. Which is more her than us, and I don’t even know why we got dragged into it,” Derek snorts, with a hook of his chin towards Allison.

“What?” Caitlin says.

Charlotte lifts her tail and then lets it thump against the ground. “No idea.”

“Well, then explain,” Caitlin says. She looks at Scott, then at Peter. Then pokes Derek, grinning again as, lip curled in a silent snarl, he…sidesteps till he’s out of her reach.

“Bennett was a hunter my father trained. Well, tried to—he panicked during a hunt and almost let someone drown, and Dad chewed him out over it. And he deserved it, but he didn’t think so—he went over to Kate’s side of thinking after that,” Allison says, sounding both tired and irritated. She wraps her free arm around herself, then shifts it down so that it’s overlapping with the arm Scott still has around her. 

“The whole drowning thing, we found out later he froze because it reminded him of this other time, when this kid at a pool party he was at fell in and they had to give him CPR,” Scott adds. “And look, I know, he doesn’t sound like a good person, but I still don’t think he should have to die without remembering who he is, and that he’s his own person. Not Kate’s. I mean, what he said a few times—I think he wished he hadn’t listened to her and let her bite him.”

Peter looks completely unimpressed with this line of reasoning, while Derek mutters something about just running onto claws if that was the problem. Stiles, admittedly, is leaning more towards them than Scott, but on the other hand, this is a powerful lizardman with paralytic venom looking for fresh orders. You don’t just let that kind of thing wander around the Dream Lands either—way too many people who’d take up that offer.

“He has to come back here, at the very least. And you can’t really kill someone in the Dream Lands, it won’t really, um, stick. Not the way you want it to,” Stiles says, watching as Derek and Peter start to object, register that he’s the one speaking, and then subside. “Well, not without being a Great Old One, and I don’t really think this merits calling up Nyarlathotep for a favor. He’d probably think it’s funnier to keep the kanima intact anyway.”

“Yes, he would,” Caitlin says, and she and Charlotte both look grim enough that Stiles reaches into his pocket and touches his phone for reassurance. That vague air of them finding humans to be a situational comedy went a _long_ way towards softening up how they’re both built to pile-drive Derek. It’s especially obvious when Caitlin bobs her head and abruptly brings it back. “So we show him he’s human, he remembers, we tell him we will eat him if he continues his old ways but if he learns the new ones, we will share the secrets of the earth with him. This also solves where we will find a new undergardener since Thurber no longer wants to.”

“Uh, wait—I mean, great that we can figure out how to help him, but…but does he want to be an undergardener?” Scott stutters, blinking rapidly. He glances at Allison, then looks back at them. “That kind of sounds like he doesn’t have a choice.”

Charlotte draws herself up with a clearly offended air. “Of course he has a choice. We will explain it to him. He will get diagrams, and paperwork. We provide competitive benefits.”

“I’m going to have to let Miskatonic HR know too,” Stiles breaks in. With his phone in hand, and maybe positioning himself so any spell he casts won’t catch Allison or Derek. “You know the census rules. And the university runs utilities out to you, he’s going to have to do the wellness and sanity check-ins.”

“Yes, yes, we know. He will be fine,” Charlotte says, subsiding but still miffed. She flicks her tail dismissively so that it attracts all of the werewolves’ attention, then hikes herself up to peer down at Scott. “Or do you want him to stay in the Dream Lands?”

“No, I just want—I want him to be better off than he is right now, and I want us all to feel safer than we’re going to if we don’t know what he’s doing. Or what he wants to do,” Scott says, looking from her to Derek and Peter. “I remember what happened too, and if he comes after us again, I’ll be the first in line to get in the way. But I still think we have a better shot of that not happening if he gets his human identity back.”

“We’d be sure of it if he was dead,” Peter says, but he snorts it out of the side of his mouth and it’s clearly just the prelude. He gives Stiles a brief glance, then a longer look at Derek, who at first looks surprised, then defensive. And then, just as Peter’s starting into a disappointed eye-roll, Derek abruptly straightens. Peter pauses and Derek’s shoulders hunch a little before he pulls them back and gives Peter a short nod. “So long as we’re _immediately_ notified the second you lose track of him.”

Now Caitlin and Charlotte both look offended, drawing their heads in till their necks almost disappear (pretty impressive when a ghoul’s neck is elongated enough they can almost twist it to see straight down their own backbone). “We will not lose track of him,” Caitlin sniffs. “We are ghouls. We track from this world to the Dreams Lands and back.”

“And neither will Miskatonic’s HR Department, which is _also_ the Department who enforces our library terms of service,” Stiles says loudly and cheerfully, while tucking his arm through Peter’s and tugging the man away. “Anyway, okay! We have located the kanima, and have a disarmament plan we can all agree on. Awesome, let’s start implementing. I’m gonna call my dad and get the university gears moving, and—and you make up your little home movie—”

Caitlin scrunches up her muzzle, then shrugs and holds out a hand. “Files.”

“Oh, I have your email, I’ll give it to Derek and he’ll email you his video clip,” Scott says, catching on. “And Allison and I will check Facebook for the pre-bite photos, and email those too. Just need to get her computer, it’s in the bedroom. You can stay in the living room, we’ll be right back.”

Charlotte humps her shoulders some, then also shrugs and squats back down. “I’m hungry,” she says to Caitlin. “Did you pack anything?”

Yep, strategic retreat to the bedrooms seems like a good idea.

* * *

“These ghouls are a lot weirder than the ones you told us about, when I was a kid,” Derek says, several hours later. Sitting with the rest of them in a local restaurant as they reconvene after a successful kanima-transportation and mental re-humanization execution, poking at his fries.

Peter doesn’t seem particularly hungry either. They didn’t actually watch the ghouls eat, or even have to go into the Dream Lands with them to retrieve the kanima, but they did stand around with the Institute’s security team afterward, while the ghouls held the semi-humanized kanima down and patiently explained ghoul life, with the promised diagrams. And paperwork. And graphic videos of how bodies are prepared for the gardens. ‘Ben’—since the kanima now knows he’s really a person but hasn’t totally remembered his identity—seemed to take things okay, but Stiles is kind of surprised that the designated mental-health assessor on the Institute team didn’t nix the videos, at least.

“I think those ghouls may have been only part-ghoul, now that I think about it,” Peter says. He frowns at his salad. “And perhaps the equivalent of an omega—at the least, they were transients. They certainly didn’t have such…extensive…opinions about proper aging.”

“Oh, that’s because of the gourmet mushroom line they’re working on,” Scott says.

Derek and Peter look at him, and then Peter picks up his fork and silently flips a slice of button mushroom out of his bowl. He removes two more before Derek, slouching and rolling his eyes, pulls the salad away. While Peter gives him a bemused look, Derek shoves the salad to the edge of the table and then uses his elbow to half-heartedly nudge his everything fries to between the two of them.

“I wasn’t talking about the dead bodies. They’re ghouls, I was expecting that,” Derek says, holding his head at a slightly awkward angle because he’s clearly avoiding having to see Peter, smiling with only half as much smug as he usually does, eating the fries. “I meant the part where Caitlin got my number and keeps texting me for more videos.”

Stiles straightens up sharply. Okay, so they have huge fangs and a communal society and anytime-access to the Dream Lands, but he is _not_ sharing. And he’s got more entities to call on besides Nodens. “Give me your phone.”

“I’ll text her to stop,” Scott jumps in.

Derek looks up as if he’s surprised at their reactions. Then he snorts. “Wait, not like—these are the videos of _you._ She thinks they’re good tutorials for the…the…what do you call a baby ghoul? They said they have litters so are they puppies?”

“That seems off,” Allison says, abandoning her barely-touched bruschetta.

“Me?” Stiles says.

“Yeah, the…the videos I was taking. So I could have something with the pronunciation right,” Derek says, suddenly looking as if he’s regretting even bringing this up.

He’s also sliding slowly down the booth, though before they can see whether Derek really can reconcile that with his backalley cool sneering, Peter does something under the table that makes Derek start up. Then grab at Peter as Peter twists around, looking at—oh, he’s got Derek’s phone.

“These aren’t all just Stiles pronouncing disarming spells,” Peter says, flicking at the screen. He raises his elbow so Derek has to retreat or smash his nose into it; Derek chooses to back off but hits Peter on the back as Peter lowers the phone to where Stiles can see. Peter grunts and absorbs it, _really_ showing family resemblance there. “All right, that’s a hand-signal trigger, but this one’s…”

“It’s not porn,” Stiles hastily says for Scott’s and Allison’s benefit. And for Derek’s too, because he doesn’t really support invasions of privacy. Not really. Even if his eyes get caught by the pinching motion Peter’s fingers make against the screen, because they’re enlarging the clip so that video-Stiles’ facial expression takes over the whole thing. “It’s—it’s me cleaning Deep One slime out of my shirt.”

Derek’s started sliding down the booth again. “You have to use five different cleaners in one specific order or the sink turns blue and grows suckers,” he mutters. “I know you wrote it up but if I’ve got a stain, I want it out before it sets. Takes too long to get the manual.”

“It is edited well,” Peter comments.

Stiles blinks, then hits ‘replay’ on the video because he hadn’t even noticed, but Peter’s right: it’s not just him cleaning slime out of his shirt. It’s cuts from multiple instances of him cleaning his clothes, stitched together. And slowed down, possibly. Some of the cuts.

“Well, I guess you would approve,” Derek is saying to Peter. Semi-aggrieved, semi-confused.

“Why, because this is clearly the result of continuous and painstakingly close observation of an oblivious subject?” Peter says, more than a hint of self-satisfaction lilting his voice. He’s mostly let go of Derek’s phone so he can twist the other way. “And I would happen to have an especial appreciation for that kind of approach? Is that what you’re implying, Derek?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re so glad Derek finally came over and joined you on the stalker side of things,” Stiles says, looping his arm around Peter’s waist and pasting his hand across Peter’s belly as a distraction. Of course then he gets Peter chuckling ticklishly into the space behind his ear, but he can mostly shrug that off. Mostly. “These actually are pretty good. And if they work better for you than my notes, look, I just want you to feel like you live with us too. I’m okay with that. I’ll even help if you just let me know what you want to shoot.”

Derek’s silent for a moment, and it’s an awkward enough silence that Stiles looks up and around Peter to catch the man’s expression. “Okay,” Derek says. He’s a little too expressionless for Stiles’ comfort, but then he slumps down, not like he’s disappearing under the table, but like that just makes it easier for him to grab a fry. “But do you want the ghouls to have them?”

“Caitlin says she already shared one with the Institute,” Scott says. He winces when they look at him, only briefly glancing up before he continues madly texting away. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know why she’d—I’m telling she really can’t do that, that’s not—though she says they think they’re great too, and are going to ping you for more?”

Sometimes Stiles completely sees why Miskatonic has such a high rate of alumni threatening to bring down the Great Old Ones on the world. “All right, I’ll just call my dad. It’s not your fault, Scott, and he’ll—”

“They want to give you grant money for them?” Scott continues, his tone growing more and more puzzled. “As part of some initiative to update their student handbook resources?”

Stiles stops for a second. “Grant money?”

“Like for production costs?” Derek says.

Scott nods uncertainly. “I think…yeah, she says it’s a big chunk, they know because they’re contributing. Also expense accounts for your film crew.”

“Expense accounts,” Peter says, not like a question. More like the beginning of a thoughtful long-term consideration.

Admittedly, Miskatonic expense accounts are not to be sneezed at. No, they are to be treated possessively, because literally nobody else lets you expense the cost of an entire Antarctic expedition to erase the trail to the Elder Things city so humanity doesn’t unleash shoggoths on itself. And Stiles _is_ a poor grad student. Well, okay, he already gets a stipend, he’s not poor, but he doesn’t have an _expense_ account.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Allison asks, raising her hand to catch Stiles’ eye. “You know, with how they work?”

She has a good point, as Stiles knows from first-hand experience. And yet…an expense account. Plus grant money. That probably is going to be way more than they need, with Derek’s experience in low-budget horror and Peter’s persuasive skills and Stiles maxing out the allowable extra-credit lab hours in undergrad, and would pay for so many nice things. “Well…” Stiles says, trying to not sound like he’s leaning any way in particular. “…oh, Derek! Derek would have to shoot, I’m not gonna do it with somebody else, and if he doesn’t want to—”

“If they’re paying, sure,” Derek says. He postures defensively, then slowly relaxes with a slightly confused air when he realizes they’re not looking at him disbelievingly because they disapprove. “I was doing it anyway.”

“Okay, I guess…I guess it doesn’t hurt to talk about it,” Stiles says.

“And cutting a pilot is hardly a commitment either, there’s no guarantee of pick-up,” Peter notes, looking as if his only interest is truly helping Stiles objectively consider the pros and cons. “We might as well if they’re giving us the money.”

Stiles looks at him. Peter smiles back, even when Stiles digs his fingertips into the side of Peter’s belly. _Especially_ when Stiles does that. Then he dips down to nuzzle the side of Stiles’ face, and over his shoulder, Stiles spots Derek. Who actually looks kind of…kind of like he is genuinely interested in the idea. And not just because somebody’s twisting his arm into it, or because he’s afraid if he isn’t, he’ll lose something he wants.

“It’ll be different to actually have a production budget for once,” Derek mutters, turning back to his fries and starting to eat them with actual gusto. “Pilot doesn’t sound too bad.”

“Okay, then. Let’s just try a pilot,” Stiles says. “Can’t hurt.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditional Lovecraft ghouls were greyish (like corpses) with more pronounced muzzles than TW werewolf prosthetics. They don't come off as particularly bright, and yes, they canonically meep and gibber. But then, Lovecraft was a dedicated cat-person. Given they're corpse-eaters, I actually imagine them as closer to hyenas, who are heavily built from the shoulders up to power their bone-crushing jaws. You also need to open your mouth wider in order to get them around bones with enough leverage.
> 
> Charlotte is named after Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Go read _The Yellow Wallpaper_.
> 
> Sarkomand is a city located in the Dream Lands, and moon-beasts are gross and horrible enemies of the ghouls, per Lovecraft's _The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath_ (warning: super-racist stuff in this one, which is unfortunate since it comes up with some very interesting landscapes). Randolph Carter is a recurring Lovecraft character who's such a powerful dreamer that he can dream himself into other worlds.
> 
> Bennett's that hunter the kanima kills after Allison's first training session. I thought about using Matt Daehler, but...way too creepy. Past drowning trauma has nothing to do with developing psychotic predatory behavior towards a woman, and I very much dislike how the show constantly tries to create those types of links.
> 
> GIMP is a great alternative to Photoshop. It's free, takes up less memory, and loads a lot faster.
> 
> Actually, letting mushrooms grow out of your corpse is just one of many flourishing "natural burial" offerings.


	11. Epilogue

“Full tuition waiver, free housing, health insurance, a stipend, a _second_ stipend for equipment, and privileged access to the weapons-testing facilities they share with the federal government,” Allison says, scrolling through the offer email. “ _And_ I don’t have to TA till my second year.”

“That sounds amazing!” Scott says, and then he takes a closer look at her. She tries to smile back, but it’s too late: he’s already slipping an arm around her shoulder, a thoughtful furrow appearing between his brows. “But you don’t look happy about it.”

“Well, no, it’s great. It’s a great offer,” Allison says.

He doesn’t believe her. What’s worse, he doesn’t look annoyed about it, like most people would if their significant other wanted to turn down basically a guaranteed financial safety net for the next three to four years. He just looks like he wants to know why she’s unhappy.

Sometimes Scott is so unbelievably considerate that Allison just wants to pinch something—something not _herself_ —and to pinch it hard. It’s a little like the way people say something is so adorable they just want to squeeze it to death, and they kind of don’t mean it that way but they kind of do. And then she catches herself, and wonders if maybe she did inherit some of her family’s insanity, and has to take a deep breath to ground herself.

“Bennett’s doing okay, the ghouls say he’s even dating somebody down there,” Scott says, while Allison is doing that. He hugs her gently as she starts, then coughs. “You know, if you were thinking you should do this just to keep an eye on him. I think they’re doing a good job of that already, and keeping us updated.”

“I…” Had not been consciously thinking about it, but now that Scott’s teased it out into the open, Allison has to admit that it had been one of the things roiling around in her head. And that it is a relief to hear somebody else say it, so that she doesn’t feel as if she’s just trying to selfishly rationalize issues away. “Well, okay, but on the other hand—”

“And Charlotte was saying he actually was thinking about moving over to their new post to follow his girlfriend, so it’s not that likely you and he are going to run into each other. Unless you want to, but I know you really want this to be its own thing,” Scott adds. He drops his arm so that he can lace their fingers together. “Or you don’t have to do it, period. You don’t need this program to be a great hunter, or a good person, you know that.”

Allison looks at him and his smile, and she…takes another breath. A real one, one that clears her head and doesn’t just buy her time. She takes it, and then she thinks about what she wants, just like they’ve been talking about for months, and then looks at her options.

“I think we can make it work,” she says. She hesitates, then lets herself go on. “I think right now, this is what’s going to work for me. I want it to.”

“Well, so we’ll make sure it does,” Scott says warmly. He leans over and kisses the side of her mouth, then starts poking at the email attachments as she squeezes his hand. “Okay, so I’ll start getting together my transfer paperwork and we can fill out the housing application this weeke—”

A video pops up on the screen of Allison’s laptop and the sound of Stiles screeching suddenly fills the air. They jump and Allison’s hand is halfway to the nearest knife before they realize the video and the screeching are connected. And in fact, the one is causing the other, since Stiles is in the video and is doing the screeching and is also being subtitled. Because this is apparently an Introduction to the Miskatonic University Supplemental Laboratory Space Lottery System.

“Does he know?” Allison eventually asks. “I know he was making videos for them, but this doesn’t really…I mean…it’s not really what he was making it sound like…oh, well, wait, I think I can see Peter in the corner trying to threaten someone. So this must be Derek filming, right? It’s kind of shaky for him—oh, wait, there he is. So he can’t be the one with the camera.”

“Um,” Scott says. When she looks over, Quint is helpfully holding up Scott’s phone with its tail-tentacles so that he can text while trying to still watch the video.

Allison looks back at the screen herself, then frowns as she notices that the bottom of the video player has a series of buttons on it. One of them looks like it might be a pop-out button—and it is, and takes her to a landing page with a number of other videos, plus a comments section under the current video that keeps flickering. She takes a closer look and realizes it’s set up as a real-time feed. Which is _very_ active.

“Is he seeing these comments?” she asks. “Does he know—does _Peter_ know Stiles has that kind of fan?”

Scott glances up, flushes, and types even more frantically. “Uh.”

“Or Derek?” Allison says, just as a GIF pops up in the feed. She cringes and averts her eyes, then remembers the other buttons she saw and hastily pokes at them to advance the feed. It starts to move, then abruptly freezes. The entire screen flashes a nauseating shade of yellow, and then goes back to normal—except for the little note where the GIF had been, stating that it had violated community guidelines. “Oh, well, at least there’s a moderator.”

“But did that just say that the user’s been suspended, or that they’ve been _suppressed_?” Scott asks. “What does that mean? That they’ve been suppressed?”

They look at each other.

“I think before I accept, I’m going to go over those minimum commitments with Stiles,” Allison says, closing the video window. She goes back to the offer email and starts downloading all the attachments. “And make sure I know what they all are.”

“He says he’s nearby and can be over in five minutes,” Scott says, consulting his phone. “He wants to see what videos they’re linking to in the offer emails anyway.”

“Okay,” Allison says. “I’ll wait.”

They look at each other again.

“Does he sound mad?” she asks.

Scott holds up the phone so that she can see all of the emojis Stiles has used. “I think Boyd said Derek and Peter are in town helping Laura with something at the house,” he says, grimacing. “Do you think we should—”

“You call Derek, I’ll text our parents so Stiles’ dad gets a heads-up,” Allison says, getting up from her seat. “I’ll go grab my crossbow while I’m up, too. Just in case this needs to get done first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The flash of yellow is, of course, a reference to the _King in Yellow_ mythology, which is related to the Cthulhu Mythos.
> 
> Would I put it past Miskatonic to take security cam footage and turn them into additional videos? Nope. You really have to read the fine print on those appearance releases.


End file.
